So I can participate again. The Broke & The Bookish made another top 10 that doesn't revolve around reading resolution. But since I need my bookshelf to brainstorm again, my Top 10's are back on Wednesday, where I work from home.
My Top 10 Most Inspirational Characters
1-Edmond Dantès from Alexandre Dumas' Count Of Monte-Christo: He's the prime example of whatever happens to you, if you stay smart and rational, you will have the chance to exert a terrible vengeance on those who caused you harm.
2-Jimmy Markum from Dennis Lehane's Mystic River: A tortured character that finds the strength to act and do what he thinks is best for everybody and not only best for him. Ill fated or not, I live to read about people like Jimmy.
3-Jay Gatsby from F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby: He's at the root of the self-made man myth. Written as the USA was leaving the Far-West era, hist struggle to reinvent himself for the woman he loves struck a nerve with me.
4-Subject #42 from David Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews With Hideous Men: Subject #42 lives with a racism that buried most of his family members, including a father who accepted his condition with dignity in order to raise him. His effort to recall and understand have the strength to carry a whole novel.
5-Toru Okada from The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles: It's a long and thick novel, but throughout, Toru Okada will gain a sense of who he is and a purpose to his life. He's a troubling, yet uplifting and courageous character in this maze of a novel.
5-Toru Okada from The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles: It's a long and thick novel, but throughout, Toru Okada will gain a sense of who he is and a purpose to his life. He's a troubling, yet uplifting and courageous character in this maze of a novel.
6-Kilgore Trout from Kurt Vonnegut's fiction: OK, he's barely fiction. He's Vonnegut's own deus ex machina. I just get a special kick out of this old and grumpy writer who stumbles upon the mess he created.
7-Tom Hagen from Mario Puzo's The Godfather: Survivor, fierce advisor of Don Corleone and loyal as a mutt. Tom is my favorite Puzo character. I can only admire his strength and his rationality.
8-Mizoguchi from Yukio Mishima's Temple Of The Golden Pavilion: Because sometimes it's the struggle that is beautiful. Fiction characters that live up to their aesthetics standards, even against all odds, make be happy to be a reader and mostly, make me want to sit behind my keyboard and write.
9-Sangamon Taylor from Neal Stephenson's Zodiac: I have a passion for those characters to live for a cause with such grace and self-abandon.
10-Amanda McCready from Dennis Lehane's Moonlight Mile: Amanda is a tragic character. She takes on herself to change fate. She's young, idealist and beautifully darkened.
9-Sangamon Taylor from Neal Stephenson's Zodiac: I have a passion for those characters to live for a cause with such grace and self-abandon.
10-Amanda McCready from Dennis Lehane's Moonlight Mile: Amanda is a tragic character. She takes on herself to change fate. She's young, idealist and beautifully darkened.
