The Mookse and the Gripes discussion

Inspired by the "Authors I Will Never Read Again" thread, here is "I Will Read Anything By These Authors" thread!

Thomas Pynchon
Michael Chabon
Salman Rushdie
Will Self
Tom Wolfe
David Mitchell
Alasdair Gray

Amended to reflect living authors only
My criterion is that when these authors release a new book I will read it first and then ask questions afterwards. I certainly don't have to have rated all existing work at five stars.

I have read and loved (in differing degrees) all 26 novels by Bernice Rubens. She was the first woman to win the Booker in 1970 for The Elected Member. Just a shout out to those who aren't familiar with her works.

Thomas Pynchon
Richard Powers
Haruki Murakami
Ali Smith
Deborah Levy
David Markson

I don't go out of my way to maintain completion for any writer, but having looked at my most read authors list, these are all either complete (excluding non-fiction and poetry) so far or only missing one (minimum 4 books each):

Chinua Achebe, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Nadeem Aslam, Julian Barnes, Sebastian Barry, A.S. Byatt, Italo Calvino, Angela Carter, Jonathan Coe, Jenny Erpenbeck, Penelope Fitzgerald, Aminatta Forna, Andrew Greig, Sarah Hall, Siri Hustvedt, Kazuo Ishiguro, Franz Kafka, Milan Kundera, John Lanchester, Jon McGregor, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Andrew Miller, David Mitchell (though possibly not for much longer!), Marilynne Robinson, Salman Rushdie, W.G. Sebald, Josef Skvorecky (excluding the Boruvka crime stories), Ali Smith, Zadie Smith, Antal Szerb, Adam Thorpe, Colm Toibin

Some I should aspire to but have at least two more each to read:
Margaret Atwood, John Banville, Albert Camus, Rachel Cusk, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Patricia Duncker, George Eliot, J.G. Farrell (still two early ones to find), Hermann Hesse, Joanna Kavenna, Doris Lessing, Orhan Pamuk, Deborah Levy, John McGahern, Andrei Makine, Javier Marias, Haruki Murakami, Iris Murdoch, Cees Noteboom, Georges Perec, Richard Powers, Thomas Pynchon, Jose Saramago, Leo Tolstoy, David Foster Wallace, Virginia Woolf, Jeanette Winterson

It reads like a pretty inconsistent and idiosyncratic selection - some of them would be easier to defend than others.

Restricting myself to the living:

Kazuo Ishiguro
David Mitchell
Cormac McCarthy
Ted Chiang

Ralf Rothman
Carol Martinez
Tan Twan Eng

Interesting exercise. I am surprised that most of the authors I came up with write in English, given that I am not a native speaker.

Other people's lists keep reminding me of more names I should add!

Interesting exercise, but I seriously cannot think of ANY author who I have/will read EVERYTHING they've written ... even if I do enjoy their work.

For example, of those others have touted, in the past year I became enthralled by Deborah Levy's work and DID read all of her novels and short stories - but found her plays boring and incomprehensible, (odd, since theatre is my field).

I've enjoyed David Mitchell's work - but there are two or three I have yet to get to. I love Dickens and Hardy when I DO read them - but rarely think to pick them up and have only read about half their canons. I read most of Pynchon's early work, but not the last couple of doorstoppers. I like Ali Smith, but have yet to make much of a dent in her backlist. Same with Sebastian Barry.

So really can't think of anyone who I would read willy-nilly - why waste time on their lesser works just to be a completist?

I've read all of Murakami's fiction and I've read everything by David Mitchell.

That's all really - on the tbr though I have everything by Zadie Smith, All of Rushdie's fiction.

That's all really I'm not good at being a completist.

For me, it's not about being a completist. It's about the authors where I think anything they write is worth looking at. I should add Siri Hustvedt to my list above. I haven't read everything she has written, but I would plan to read anything by her that I came across.

Beverly wrote: "I have read and loved (in differing degrees) all 26 novels by Bernice Rubens. She was the first woman to win the Booker in 1970 for The Elected Member. Just a shout out to those who aren't familiar..."

Another Bernice Rubens fan! I've only read The Elected Member, Madame Sousatzka, and A Five Year Sentence, but I plan to read more. I find Rubens an interesting writer and, from what I've read about her, an interesting person too. Here's a link to a lovely joint interview with Rubens and Beryl Bainbridge: https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/6.... Also, Brendan King's biography of Beryl Bainbridge (Beryl Bainbridge: Love by All Sorts of Means) contains some material on Rubens' friendship with Bainbridge.

These have been fun to read.

By the way, I don't know if it's particularly useful, but I have made threads for many authors just for folks who are making some kind of methodical exploration of their works. I just created a new one today for Anita Brookner, for example.

I'd love it if people would start some threads (see the general layout we like, but we aren't strict) for any authors they are working through.

I even have an index (here) so that they can be easily found.

Neil wrote: "For me, it's not about being a completist. It's about the authors where I think anything they write is worth looking at. I should add Siri Hustvedt to my list above. I haven't read everything she has written, but I would plan to read anything by her that I came across.."

Think in a way that is my completist point though, as there are several authors I think "if they wrote another book I would definitely, and immediately read it". Yet at the same time I haven't read all their back catalogue, even some of the well-known ones (i.e. I can't just say I've avoided earlier less well formed works). As examples, Ali Smith and Deborah Levy would both fall into that category for me.

Whereas the examples below are ones where I have felt compelled to seek out their entire back catalogue - which to me elevates them to another category of writers in my personal pantheon.

Still writing (I hope):
Kenzaburo Oe
Lazlo Krasznahorkai
Per Pettersen
Kazuo Ishiguro
Salman Rushdie
Orhan Pamuk
Haruki Murakami
Javier Marias
Andrei Makine
Elena Ferrante (sorry Jonathan)

Deceased in last 50 years:
Jose Saramago
Thomas Bernhard
WG Sebald
Gabriel Garcia Marquez

(as mentioned I tend to ration myself more on older writers so several I plan to add to this list e.g. Virginia Woolf. Fyodor Dostoyevsky)

(and really need an author to have produced several books to qualify for me - e.g. say Han Kang could one day feature but so far she has only 3, soon to be 4, books out in English)

I am not a completist and so don't mind skipping imperfect works by writers I admire save for the following whose every word I would like to read before my last day...

Off the top of my head.

Vladimir Nabokov
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Marcel Proust
Franz Kafka
Orhan Pamuk
Jorge Luis Borges
Machado de Assis
Milan Kundera
Pablo Neruda
Anton Chekhov

et al.

Jose Saramago
Jane Gardham
Kazio Ishiguro
Hilary Mantel
John Banville
A.S. Byatt
Patrick White
Penelope Lively
Julian Barnes

It seems easier to say I hope to live long enough to read every book by every writer I find interesting!

Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, E.M. Forster, and most of all George Eliot.

I love a lot of other writers, and individual books, but I can read these writer's novels again and again.

Ali Smith
Donna Tartt
Zadie Smith
Thomas Pynchon
David Mitchell
Jonathan Coe
Salman Rushdie
Haruki Murakami
Jonathan Safran Foer

I think I have read most of Ali Smith's, Zadie Smith's, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's, Magnus Mills's, Ian McEwan's, William Trevor's and Haruki Murakami's novels, plus several of Colm Tóibín's, Iris Murdoch's and Helen Dunmore's. I haven't read all their short stories or non-fiction.
This thread has reminded me of several more authors whose back catalogue I intended to seek out.

I need to add Benjamin Myers to my list. I don’t plan on reading his journalist accounts of rock bands, even though I am a huge fan of John Lydon and PIL, and Turning Blue was hard for me to read because it is very raw, but after Beastings, Pig Iron, and of course, The Gallows Pole I’m a real fan.
I’ve also read and heard some of his poems and the poems of Adelle Stripe his wife.
Adelle sent me the link to her poem The Humber Star being read and it was amazing. I don’t think she’d mind me sharing it since she sent it in a public tweet.

http://www.halldorsmarason.com/the-hu...

Lydia Davis, Edith Pearlman, Alice Munro, Fleur Jaeggy, Cynthia Ozick, Cesar Aira, and Gunnhild Øyehaug. Interestingly, all but one is a woman, three are foreign language authors, and all primarily write short stories or short novels.

Of course, there are plenty of other authors whose new books I will read, but the above seven are the writers I most ardently admire.

Nicola Barker
Colm Tóibín
Alan Hollinghurst
Eimear McBride
Penelope Lively
Kazuo Ishiguro
Jon McGregor
David Mitchell

There’s certainly more names to add here, but these are the ones I could think of off the top of my head.

I like all of most on your list, James. The only two I have yet to read are Eimar McBride and Nicola Barker, but if you group them with the others I’m sure I’ll like them.

Peter Watts
Alastair Reynolds
Jane Austen
Hanya Yanagihara
EM Forster
Cixin Liu
Han Kang
Octavia Butler
Ali Smith

Well I guess it's a little silly - but I intentionally avoid reading all the books by my favourite authors - so there are still some left on the shelf I haven't read :-)

These are the living authors where I own all/most of their books, and will buy any new ones without a second thought:

Jón Kalman Stefánsson
Paul Auster
Siri Hustvedt
Amélie Nothomb
Haruki Murakami
Salman Rushdie
Johan Theorin
Neil Gaiman

I often pass on 1-3 star books by non-favourite authors after reading them - but these deceased favourite authors I want to keep everything by :

Jacob Paludan
Antal Szerb
Charles Dudley Warner
Roberto Bolaño
Virginia Woolf

Louise wrote: "Well I guess it's a little silly - but I intentionally avoid reading all the books by my favourite authors - so there are still some left on the shelf I haven't read :-)

I tend to do that too. With tv too; there are so many tv shows I've watched where I haven't watched the last few episodes.

I don't have many authors for whom I would read everything because at some point they tend to let me down (i.e. Murakami, David Mitchell, Marquez). The only people I can think of that I'm really a completionist for would be Virigina Woolf and Elena Ferrante.

Sara wrote: "I don't have many authors for whom I would read everything because at some point they tend to let me down (i.e. Murakami, David Mitchell, Marquez)."

Perhaps the more novels published by a novelist, then the greater likelihood that one or more novels will be a let-down. And conversely, the fewer the novels published by a novelist, then the lesser the likelihood of any novel being a let-down. Just as an example: Marilynne Robinson—only four novels published over 34 years—but each one a gem (at least for some of us).

Louise wrote: "Well I guess it's a little silly - but I intentionally avoid reading all the books by my favourite authors - so there are still some left on the shelf I haven't read :-)"
That's not silly at all (or if it is, then I am too), it always leaves you with some books to look forward to enjoying when you do read them.

My approach is slightly different. I read all books by favourite authors and then I re-read them. If you are prepared to re-read books, you never run out of books by your favourite authors! (And, if they are your favourites, why would you not want to re-read them?).

That said, there are very few writers where I have read all their books. Richard Powers sits there proudly with all 12 of his books in the "re-read at least one more time" category (some already read twice).

Neil wrote: "My approach is slightly different. I read all books by favourite authors and then I re-read them. If you are prepared to re-read books, you never run out of books by your favourite authors! (And, i..."

Exactly. Well said, Neil.

Neil wrote: "My approach is slightly different. I read all books by favourite authors and then I re-read them. If you are prepared to re-read books, you never run out of books by your favourite authors! (And, i..."

Agreed! One thing I learnt is that the book you like the least by your fave author usually ends up being your preferred one second time round

And dont you find that your opinion on how much you like various books differs at different times in your life.

You’re right, Neil. And there is always the risk of dying without having read those last few books so Neil’s approach sounds the best to me.
Saramago is a completist for me and I have a few of his best body of work “saved,” but I have read The Gospel According to Jesus Christ twice and All the Names three times. (All the Names might be my favorite book ever.)

As there are many fans of translated fiction in our group, let me add some more authors whom I love and who are writing in, well, not English! :-)

Sjón (Iceland)
Ödön von Horváth (Hungarian, but wrote in German; a real classic in German-speaking countries, obviously pretty unknown elsewhere)
Christian Kracht (Swiss; again very famous in German-speaking countries, and I read everything by him and a lot about him)
Clemens J. Setz (Austrian; writes experimental fiction)
Clemens Meyer (German, born in the GDR; got some attention with his nomination for last year's MBI, but clearly not yet famous enough)

...and yes, all of them have been translated!

Cordelia wrote: "And dont you find that your opinion on how much you like various books differs at different times in your life."
Yes: some novels read decades ago I still enjoy and appreciate, and others just remind me of how different I was then from how I am now.

Meike wrote: "As there are many fans of translated fiction in our group, let me add some more authors whom I love and who are writing in, well, not English! :-)

Sjón (Iceland)
[author:Ödön von H..."

Thanks for posting these Meike. I'll look forward to checking them all out...all will be new to me.

I have read a few of Sjón's books but none by the other authors.

Lark wrote: "Thanks for posting these Meike. I'll look forward to checking them all out...all will be new to me."

You're welcome, Lark - I would love to read your reviews about some of these!

Val wrote: "I have read a few of Sjón's books but none by the other authors."

Sjón is brilliant, and the other authors I named are bona fide literary stars in German-speaking countries - when Kracht, Setz or Meyer publish a new book, it's an event that will be covered in all major papers.

Thanks Meike, I will give some of them a try.

Anita Brookner
Henry Green
Alice McDermott
Patrick Modiano
Jean Rhys
Marilyn Robinson
Philip Roth
I’ve read and reread all of Marilynn Robinson’s and Philip Roth’s novels: every Robinson novel feels like a gem to me; some of Roth’s novels over his fifty plus year career feel like gems, and others were slogs. I’m now rereading McDermott and Rhys, and I’m reminded just how much I love their writing. Fortunately, I still have many not-yet-read Brookner and Modiano novels, and I’m looking forward to reading every single one of them. And I plan to reread all of Henry Green, who I only started reading in late 2017.

Here are some writers whose work I track down more than others:

Haruki Murakami
Jón Kalman Stefánsson
Thomas Bernhard
László Krasznahorkai
Natsume Sōseki
Wolfgang Hilbig
Javier Marías

I just discovered this thread, and now have a number of authors I plan to check out, so thanks!

I keep a list of authors that I read regularly, and plan to eventually read everything they have written (if I haven't already). I often add to this list when I discover a writer who appeals greatly to me:

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Isabel Allende
Margaret Atwood
John Banville
Pat Barker
Julian Barnes
Sebastian Barry
Sara Baume
John Boyne
Geraldine Brooks
NoViolet Bulawayo
Peter Carey
Michael Chabon
Alexander Chee
Michael Crummey
Louis de Bernieres
Patrick deWitt
Hernan Diaz
Anthony Doerr
Dave Eggers
Louise Erdrich
Percival Everett
Michel Faber
Richard Flanagan
Aminatta Forna
Damon Galgut
Amitav Ghosh
Julia Glass
Louisa Hall
Siri Hustvedt
Kazuo Ishiguro
Eowyn Ivey
Thomas Keneally
Barbara Kingsolver
Katie Kitamura
Hari Kunzru
Laila Lalami
Tara Lynn Masih
Daniel Mason
Ian McEwan
Philipp Meyer
Derek B. Miller
Lydia Millet
Rohinton Mistry
David Mitchell
Antonio Munoz Molina
Haruki Murakami
Tea Obreht
Tim O'Brien
Maggie O'Farrell
Yoko Ogawa
Michael Ondaatje
Ann Patchett
Per Petterson
Richard Powers
Annie Proulx
Tom Rachman
Vaddey Ratner
Salman Rushdie
Mary Doria Russell
Mark Salzman
Diane Setterfield
Elif Shafak
Jane Smiley
Ali Smith
Zadie Smith
Edward St. Aubyn
Emily St. John Mantel
Neal Stephenson
Tan Twan Eng
Thrity Umrigar
Abraham Verghese
Markus Zusak

Authors No Longer with Us (I'm still reading their back catalogues): Charles Dickens, E.L. Doctorow, Thomas Hardy, Robert Hellenga, Penelope Lively, Hilary Mantel, Cormac McCarthy, Iris Murdoch, Philip Roth, Jose Saramago, Carol Shields, Nevil Shute, Wallace Stegner, Richard Wagamese

Non-Fiction Authors: Rick Atkinson, Tim Butcher, Ron Chernow, Timothy Egan, Elizabeth Kolbert, Erik Larson, David McCullough, Nathaniel Philbrick, Michael Punke, Hampton Sides, Simon Winchester

I had completely forgotten this thread. I think my list would be longer now, though one or two may have dropped off it.

If anything I think my list gets shorter (and not just due to authors dying). Looking back on the list I put up thread I had Murakami, Rushdie and Makine. I have read the latest by the last two, but in both cases wondered why I did given how much other exciting new writing there is and that their novels tend to tread familiar ground. There’s a new Makine out and I am debating if I should consciously break the habit.

We have a significant overlap, Hugh. I didn't realize this was for living authors only. I've edited mine. Also took out those who write mostly non-fiction, as it doesn't seem too popular in this group.

I am not the only one who has included dead authors in my list, so I won't be removing them.