Mark Birtles, Novelist

Reading List

Here are some favorite authors, listed in alphabetical order. For a list of current works in progress, click the Portfolio tab above.

Mesu Andrews, Christy Award winner and driving force in Christian historic fiction. Her Pharaoh’s Daughter bristles with superb research and compelling prose. Well done, my friend.

Davis Bunn, often writing as Thomas Locke; teacher, prolific Christian author, citizen of the world. Thanks for the encouragement. The Black Madonna, Gold of Kings, Lion of Babylon.

Sir Winston Churchill. Statesman and British Prime Minister, also the writer of an epic six-volume series, The Second World War. Not the easiest read, but worth the effort.

Michael Crichton. Jurassic Park. The Andromeda Strain. Congo. Timeline. The Lost World. Need I say more?

Agatha Christy, prolific author, queen of the detective mystery, inventor of Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile, And Then There Were None.

Charles Dickens. Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, A Christmas Carol, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations. Wow. Wish I had about five percent of his talent.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Best known as the inventor of Sherlock Holmes. A Study in Scarlet, The Valley of Fear, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Sign of the Four. Instant immersion into Victorian England, prose that drips with thick London fog on Hansom Cabs. Iconic.

Alfred Edersheim, Jewish scholar and convert to Christianity. The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah is his seminal history of Israel in the days of Christ. Lengthy, but worth the effort. You’ll learn a lot, and likely gain a new perspective.

F Scott Fitzgerald, poster-boy for the Jazz Age. The Great Gatsby, This Side of Paradise, Tender is the Night. The story of Jay Gatsby, widely considered the best novel of the 20th Century, is exuberant, hedonistic, and ultimately tragic. You can’t look away.

Alton Gansky, Christian author, teacher, collector of antique typewriters and brilliant interpreter of deep secrets. Wounds, Angel, Enoch. Thank you.

John Gardner, Bennington College English professor, consummate instructor and author. On Writers and Writing, The Art of Fiction, On Moral Fiction, On Becoming a Novelist. His novella Grendel is a retelling of the Beowulf story, told from the monster’s point of view. Edgy, but truly inspired.

Dashiel Hammet. Ever heard of The Maltese Falcon? I thought so. Hammet also wrote Red Harvest, The Dain Curse, The Glass Key, and The Thin Man; all engaging works of 1930’s Noir.

Thomas Hardy. His most famous novel, The Return of the Native, is a masterpiece of the British Gentry. You simply must read it.

Ernest Hemingway. Some say he invented the modern novel. His style is spare, his voice pointedly insistent. He sometimes stretches a single paragraph across two pages. A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Old Man and the Sea (winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 1953).

Tosca Lee, writer and teacher, weaver of edgy Christian narratives. Her novel, Demon, just might keep you up at night. Thanks for the great advice.

CS Lewis. Who has not read his Narnia stories, or at least seen the movies? Brilliant Oxford don with the amazing ability to write so children, and even their parents, can understand him.

Jack London. Narrator of the Yukon gold rush and first author to earn more than one million dollars. The mention of his name makes me feel cold. Read The Call of the Wild, White Fang or the short story To Build a Fire, and you’ll understand.

Herman Melville. Captain Ahab. The whaler Pequod. The Great White Whale. Moby-Dick is a dark tale of insane revenge, human endurance and the unthinking terrors of nature. Vivid, personal, tragic, unforgettable.

James Michener. The king of historic fiction. Chesapeake, Caribbean, Alaska, and 37 more.

Frank Peretti, pioneer of modern Christian fiction, often with rather dark undertones and always fascinating. This Present Darkness, Piercing the Darkness.

Linda Rodante, author of Waterfall and 16 other Christian novels, also a prodigy of manuscript critique. Thank you.

Joel Rosenberg, perhaps not the inventor of the political thriller, but certainly at the head of the genre. Some of his work is almost scary, and eerily predictive. The Twelfth Imam, Damascus Countdown.

Mark Twain. His novels Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. His characters Becky Thatcher and the widow Douglas. Icons all, from the mind of one of the world’s truly great, and stubbornly irreverent, writers.

Oscar Wilde. Quirky—some would say degenerate—but no one denies his brilliance. The Picture of Dorian Gray is a masterpiece, with dialog so tight and prose so literary, it sets a standard.

PG Wodehouse. If you’ve read him, you understand and you’re now smiling. Possibly even laughing. If not, you are horribly deprived. The high water mark of upper-crust fiction, a tour-de-force of all things British, a stiff upper lip he delights in skewering. His Jeeves and Wooster series should be required reading. They’re also on video with Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry. Inspired, and very dry, lunacy.

Virginia Woolf. Her novella, Mrs. Dalloway, is one of the stranger, and more rewarding, things I’ve read. It's one enormous, stream-of-consciousness chapter, with masterful pivots and deep inner monologue. You’ll learn about life, and about writing, if you make this investment of time.