The all caps dialog of Owen Meany
Cormac McCarthy’s spare punctuation around ornate sentences
The thread of narration in American Pastoral
It could be considered a spoiler I guess so I won’t say exactly what I mean but the way the narration is structured around this story is one of the most expertly executed things I’ve ever read.
Complex narration in Frankenstein
The poetic repetition of The Odyssey
Meta fiction in Vonnegut’s work
“That was me. That was I. That was the author of this book.”
Thematic meter in Shakespeare
Shakespeare writes in iambic pentameter except when he doesn’t. And when he doesn’t there’s often a reason, from the mixed up meter of the witch in Macbeth to the trochaic fairey speak. In Midsummer Night’s Dream there’s even metrical cues when the moon is acting up. It is all so beautiful.
The thematic use of time in How To Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
The opening lines of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
The embedded overt history lessons in Les Miserables
The minutia of Nicholson Baker
The brazen but effective concept of Sophie’s World
Archived Post
This post is archived from my account on li.st, a social media app that shut down in 2017. Some posts have been edited slightly to fix typographical errors and correctly represent the gender of some individuals. You can view the full archive here.