Modern English Writers

If we look at modern English writers, it is difficult to know where to start.
However, I will start with my Dad's era, he was born in 1926.
Therefore he would have read, Enid Blyton as a child, he would have known about the Famous Five and Noddy. He would have also read the Wizard of Oz written by L.Frank Baum.

Most of his friends would have read Biggles written by W.C. Johns. At school , texts and readers would include, Dick and Jane, by William S. Gray and Zena Sharp.

Looking at my own childhood , I read books such as, A Kestrel for a Knave, written by Barry Hines.
We studied 'Animal Farm' by George Orwell and 1984 by the same author.
A really big influence on my reading and that of my brothers had to be comics. We bought hundreds of them, Batman, Superman, Spideman, Captain America, to name but a few.
I also read Tolkien, the Hobbit was a favourite and it is now a major film, along with the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
I like to read books by Charles Dickens and I would say that one of my favourite books and films of all time is, Greatest Expectations.
We also read and watched stories such as Bram Stoker's Dracula, this frightened the life out of me, but we would always watch the Frankenstein movies from behind the chair!
Books such as the Railway children by Edith Nesbit and My friend Flicker by Mary O'Hara were also very popular.

As a teenager, the diaries of Adrian Mole written by Sue Townsend was very popular and still is!
I have recently revisited some of my favourite books of all time and they include the timeless, Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stephenson . This story of pirates has of course become very popular today because of Captain Jack Sparrow and the Porates of the Caribbean with Jonny Depp.
I have also recently  read Moby Dick by Melville, this is quite a difficult book, but well worth the effort!
Today's writers are as famous as Dickens, J.K.Rowling and her Harry Potter books are known throughout the world and rightly so! They are wonderful stories, timeless and I am sure will become classics in their own right!
So what about today's writers?
The Boy in the striped trousers written by John Boyne is a very important text that is being read by young people as a text for study.
Twighlight by Stephenie Meyer is a huge hit both as a film and a text. It seems to have folowed in the footsteps of the class Dracula stories.
The Hunger games by Suzanne Collins is also typical of the trending idea of turning the book into a film and then a computer game.
The Life of Pi by Yanni Martel is without doubt one of my favourite books of all time along with the thought provoking The Curious Incident of the dog in the Night by Mark Haddon.

Kostroma April 11th. 2013