Maybe this will help me address the recent problem of my incredibly long-winded posts: I will race against the rapidly depleting battery power of my laptop. The impetus for tonight's brain blast is a brief conversation I had after school today with my good pal Bob Darken, a writer who spends his days teaching, as opposed to one such as I, a teacher who spends his evenings writing (sometimes). He recently read Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. We talked about the qualities of the narration that make the book so good, and it was nice to have a discussion with someone who attends to some of the same qualities I attend to when I read.

So I came up with a mental list of the qualities of pleasing narration. Foremost among them is a sense that the narrator really cares about his characters. He may still expose them to danger, he may show you sides of them they'd prefer he kept hidden, he may even have them act in ways contrary to their self-interest, but you always feel like he's concerned about their well-being. Foer is excellent about this with Oskar and with his protagonists in Everything is Illuminated.

I'm also drawn to writers who move the narration around. It's easier to hear the voices of the narrators when you're not trying to figure out the voice of the author. And I respond to writers who write energetically, particularly in the force of their prose. On the cover of The Lazarus Project, Gary Shteyngart is quoted as writing that Aleksandar Hemon "can't write a boring sentence."

So these are the three authors you should read if you like really kick-ass authors:

Gary Shteyngart - Absurdistan; The Russian Debutante's Handbook
Jonathan Safran Foer - Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close; Everything is Illuminated
Aleksandar Hemon - The Lazarus Project; Nowhere Man; I haven't gotten to The Question of Bruno yet

To this point I've beaten the battery, which makes me think of another thing. Did you ever notice that th