What follows is all the authors that I have read in the last four or so years. Pick a name, choose one of their books, and enjoy:


Thomas Pynchon,
Kurt Vonnegut,
Joseph Heller,
David Foster Wallace,
Vladimir Nabokov,
John Updike,
Jonathan Safran Foer,
Ray Bradbury,
Stephen King,
Bret Easton Ellis,
Danniel Handler,
Philip Roth,
Sylvia Plath,
Evelyn Waugh,
Bernhard Schlink,
J. R. R. Tolkien,
James Joyce,
William Faulker,
John Irving,
Cormac McCarthy,
Washington Irving,
Mary Shelly,
Bram Stoker,
Anne Rice,
Jack Kerouac,
Richard Yates,
Chuck Palahniuk,
John Kennedy Toole,
Milan Kundera,
Gene Wilder,
F. Scott Fitzgerald,
Haruki Murakami,
Michael Chabon,
Annie Proulx,
J. D. Salinger,
William Styron,
Henry James,
Virginia Wolf,
Ian McEwan,
John Steinbeck,
Ezra Pound,
T. S. Eliot,
Walt Whitman,
Robert Frost,
Geoffrey Chaucer,
J. M. Barrie,
Jane Austen,
Charlotte Bronte,
Emily Bronte,
Willkie Collins,
Charles Dickens,
Gustave Flaubert,
D. H. Lawrence,
Henry James,
Upton Sinclair,
Sinclair Lewis,
Nathaniel Hawthorne,
Herman Melville,
Ernest Hemingway,
Oscar Wilde,
Honore de Balzac,
Victor Hugo,
Marcel Proust,
Fydor Dostoyevsky,
Jean-Paul Satre,
Tom Robbins,
Ayn Rand,
Alice Sebold,
Robert Louis Stevenson,
Ken Kesey,
Roald Dahl,
James Michener,
John Fowles,
Clive Barker,
Bel Kaufman,
Flannery O’Connor

This poem was written whilst I was reading the novel Nausea by Satre and it is fairly abstract and has different meanings for different people. For me, it is a treatise on the nature of the mind, my mind as a writer. To you it may be competely different...

Across the misted lakes of the mind,
Down the path of pitch,
Up the slopes of a misanthrope,
There a certain hitch.

Splattered in the psyche,
Of every ordinary man,
Straddled with existence,
A sentimental sense.

I am here, the mind calls bashed,
And here life is sane,
Though the insane do remain,
Among the otherwise inane.

For all who think,
who know their mind,
understand that love is divine,
simple yet complex.

This is the rub, of all who think,
that the mind’s creative level stink,
for those who feel a throb of pain,
slithering in their squalor.

This pain is known,
by all who know,
as creative liberties go,
as a subtle show of attention.

We all are novelists, recounting the past,
feeling nostalgia hit the gas,
but for those who think abroad,
are simply known as poets.

As for the simple man,
we write about injustice,
knowing of the entity know as revenge,
being the libertines that all men are.

And as men goes, for those who know,
we write about love and woman,
feeling a sentiment of lost love,
hang heavily in our heart.

For the simple woman,
they write about love
,knowing of the ultimate shove,
feeling that broken heart.

And as woman have the right to know,
they write about broken hearts,
feeling those broken nights spent in limbo,
healing and healing with their own power.

I am the shadow of the writers pain,
and I know of simple pleasures,
so let us regain, now dear friend
,our own creative abilities.

Identity

There is a certain subtle beauty to which I have been taught over the last fours years of my life. Identity is a certain element of all human being’s lives and allows one to look into one’s soul and cope with who they are and what they are. They are able to ‘identify’ with themselves and this seems to be journey that most humans take at one point in their lives, whether it be when one is sixteen and in high school or forty in a failing marriage. Identity is part of the human experience and aids in the maturing of most adults, as well as young adults. Countless philosophers have a concrete theory of ‘identity’, which is sometimes called sameness. It is the overall theory that identity is whatever makes something the same or different. In my mind, I agree with this in a sense. For me, this theory involves both inanimate objects as well as animate objects, but deals with something on the outer shell. For animate objects, it doesn’t deal with the emotional state of identity.
Such elements of life has left me in a dismal state and I have found it hard to find my own identity or who I am. In my mind, identity is who and what I am. It defines the person that I am in this moment in time. Though some scholars may disagree, this is a personal philosophy and reflects my thoughts and understandings of the world through my eyes. There are times when I look back see if my identity has ever changed and it has. As we mature, I believe that everyone’s identity changes, along with the overall passage of time. It is also a psychological element. Maturity and identity, I believe, dwell together and share an almost ominous quality. It is something that everyone wants to find, but it seems to evade us. It escapes when we need it the most. It is the knight who has been searching for the treasure of gold, but is always thrust in different directions. Identity is the journey of all living things. We must find it within ourselves. Once this is done, we can move forward and find the knowledge that we are seeking.
In my freshman year of high school, I was a chubby white male who had auditioned himself into a performing arts school to divulge his time with the theatrical arts. As the year progressed, I aged and the philosophy of my mind dwindled into nothing but a mere scrap of burning paper. With time passing and grades starting to fail, a disease I had as a child avenged my body and slowly took me into a descent of ill health as well as depression. In these dark times, I was often left alone in a dimly lit hospital chamber, hooked up to whizzing machines, knowing that I was sickly. I had hoped to see the light of life again, but depression took hold and the unbearable darkness of actually being a human took hold. It may have been in the painful procedures or the subtle surgeries, but I slowly matured into something that I didn’t think I could possibly become. In my enlightenment, I found my identity, who I was as a person. At that time, I felt that I was a Christian being with a good head atop his shoulders. I was wrong. I had thought that I had matured and that the identity had come to me. Now, I know that it takes time and that it can change when one has constantly changing personal viewpoints. In this sense, I continued my journey, as a students and a human.
Two surgeries later, I entered into my first serious relationship and was shown what a schmuck I actually was. I had not matured. I had not found my own personal identity. I was a lost soul, gliding through life on autopilot. This changed and for the first time in my life, the gates opened and I was allowed to enjoy myself and who I was. In my journey, I found that I was a decent writer and a humble human being.
My philosophy slowly metamorphosed into what is called existentialism. I controlled the aspects of my life. With a new identity, I saw myself in a new light. When I look back at the chubby boy in the hospital bed, crying his eyes out, I see a young man who had not yet found himself. Everyone has their own opinion and it is great that they do. Some may had a differing opinion of the nature of identity, but I find that it is finding yourself and who you are comfortable being. This is identity and no one can take it away from you.
Call it life’s journey. I once heard an elderly author say that identity was the journey of life and that we don’t find it until the very moment we pass on. In that moment when we are able to look back at the things that we have done in life and assess our wrongdoing. As I listened on the radio, I heard this elderly author speak the following, “We are sent to this earth to complete a mission. We are expected to mature. We are expected to live life to the fullest. We are expected to enjoy everything. And finally we are expected to identify with ourselves and realize the most wondrous epiphany of all: that we had lived a life worth living” It may see a bit inspirational, but I somewhat agree with what the author was saying.
Look through any dictionary and you will find a definition for ‘identity.’ It is the instance and condition of being one’s self. It is finding who are you. It is being comfortable with the person that you are becoming. Nothing and not force of will can snatch this from anyone. And most humans know this.
Identity is the basis of all self interaction. It is identity.