21st Century Literature discussion
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Most-Read Authors
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1 A.S. Byatt 17
2 Iris Murdoch 16
3 Julian Barnes 15
4= Adam Thorpe , Jonathan Coe, Gabriel García Márquez, Milan Kundera, Salman Rushdie 12
and yes, this is accurate. No surprises!
Here's mine1. Roald Dahl
2. Haruki Murakami
3. Irvine Welsh
4. Kurt Vonnegut
5. Ali Smith
Well sort of accurate Kurt Vonnegut was really from my late teens, and Roald Dahl , mostly childhood and mid teens, two authors I do not read anymore but I can't complain as the remaining three are still authors who I like, even though the quality of Irvine Welsh's books (last decent one was Porno) have declined, I still buy everything that is published with his name on it
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Robert, have you read any of Dahl's adult work? He has a short story collection (The Best of Roald Dahl) that is marvelous. Just twisted and wonderful. And not for children. I didn't even know he wrote non-children's books until my wife enlightened me many years ago.
J1 José Saramago 21J1 Haruki Murakami 21
3 Thomas Bernhard 20
4 Javier Marias 18
J5 Milan Kundera 16
J5 Gabriel García Márquez 16
As I would expect these and the next 6 - Rushdie, Kenzaburo Oe, Orhan Pamuk, Andrei Makine, WG Sebald and Kazuo Ishiguro (all 10+ books) are pretty much the only authors whose books I keep after reading, and also those authors where I have read every (translated) book they have written and (if still alive) would immediately buy any new book sight unseen.
Of course Enid Blyton, EE Doc Smith, Agatha Christie and others would be on here - and indeed well ahead - if I went back to my childhood and teens and had entered all of those on GR.
Marc wrote: "Robert, have you read any of Dahl's adult work? He has a short story collection (The Best of Roald Dahl) that is marvelous. Just twisted and wonderful. And not for children. I didn't even know he wrote non-children's books until my wife enlightened me many years ago."Roald Dahl's Tales of the Unexpected were a TV staple in the UK for a decade
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_o...
I can't say I'm proud of the list I get, although it is roughly what I expected:1. John Grisham
2. Haruki Murakami
3. Don DeLillo
4. Ian Fleming
=5. Richard Powers
=5. David Mitchell
John Grisham harks back to my younger days and when I joined GR I ticked all the ones I'd read to get my shelves up and running. Ian Fleming is there because I recently set myself the target of reading all the James Bond novels (interesting, Fleming is buried in a church yard about 3 miles from my house).
Richard Powers would be a lot higher up the list if he had written more books! Likewise David Mitchell, although not with the same level of enthusiasm as for Powers.
Like Paul says, if I really delved into history, Enid Blyton would probably top the list as I read, I think, everything in every series she wrote. But then I had my 10th birthday and stopped!
Marc wrote: "17 Byatts--imressive, Hugh! (I've yet to read a single one.) Just read The Sea, the Sea as my first Murdoch and absolutely loved it.Robert, have you read any of Dahl's adult work? He..."
Yes :) - I discovered those when I was 15. In fact Roald Dahl's short stories are the reason why I'm constantly dissatisfied with most short story collections i've read - his are just perfect, barely a dud(just a couple of his war ones, when he was just learning how to craft a short story).
His one published Novel My Uncle Oswald (as he actually wrote a dystopian novel but it is out of print) is only suitable for a mid teen. I tried rereading it in my 30's and I thought it was awful
Paul wrote: "Marc wrote: "Robert, have you read any of Dahl's adult work? He has a short story collection (The Best of Roald Dahl) that is marvelous. Just twisted and wonderful. And not for children. I didn't e..."Yes - whenever it was on in Canada (as part of commonwealth British programs are on heavy rotation over there) my parents would send me out - however I sneaked an episode and it was the boy and his turtle.
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1 Italo Calvino 20
2 Philip K. Dick 14
3 Robert Coover 13
4 Brian K. Vaughan 12
=5 Jeff Smith 11
=5 Neil Gaiman 11
=5 Stephen King 11
Vaughan, Smith, and Gaiman all hit that because of comic book or graphic novel series (I think I read the 8 or 9-volume Bone series Smith did with my son when he was learning to read). No surprises, but only the first 3 would be in my top 10 or even top 20 list.
Robert, I also felt Dahl had ruined short story collections for me--I now tend to read a story or two and then dip into another book instead of trying to read a whole collection through. That bastard!
See, Paul, I knew my childhood TV programming was a ripoff here in the States... We did get some BBC stuff--I remember watching Dr. Who in the early '80s and there was this THAMES typographical sign-off that kind of hummed (I might be misremembering this somewhat).
Thanx for the tip Marc - I found this rather fascinating ... my list:1. Mike Bartlett - 13 *
2. Deborah Levy - 12
3. Anthony Powell - 12 (i.e., the 12 volumes of A Dance to the Music of Time)
4. Will Eno - 10 *
5. Edward St. Aubyn - 10
6. Jordan Harrison 10 *
7. Sigrid Undset - 9
8. Alistair McDowell - 9 *
9. Simon Stephens 9 *
10. Samuel D. Hunter - 8 *
11. Jez Butterworth - 7 *
12. Duncan MacMillan - 7 *
* These are all playwrights; about half of my reading is contemporary play scripts, since theatre is my field. Undset was rather a surprise, but like Powell, 8 of the 9 are all in two different series, so maybe should only count as 3?!
I only joined GR in 2014, however, and have been lax in rating anything read before then ... had I done so, this list would look VERY different, with Shakespeare, Hardy, Dickens, Ian Fleming, Tennessee Williams, Faulkner and McCullers all up there (the last three being subjects of various college theses, so I have read virtually everything by them).
Let me just preface this list by saying that when I first joined GR, I checked as read every book I could remember that I had ever read. My top three are science fiction and the next two next mystery, and number 6 is back to science fiction. These are the authors who are quite prolific. I have not read a book by the number 2 on my list in 20 years - he was my favorite in my teens and my twenties - and it has been 8-10 years since I read any books by my top author, but I still religiously read at least one series by authors 3-5. They are my comfort books.1. Orson Scott Card (32)
2. Robert A. Heinlein (30)
3. C.J. Cherryh (25)
4. Sara Paretsky (23)
5. John Connolly (22)
The GR list only shows my top 66 authors and I've read 4 books each by the last 34 authors. There are a slew of other authors, many of the literary ones, that I've only read 1, 2, or 3 and do not show on the GR list. My top five non-genre authors (as this group defines genre for purposes of differentiating between our quarterly and monthly reads) are:
1. Neil Gaiman (10)
2. Barbara Kingsolver (9)
3. Ron Rash (7)
3. Michael Chabon (7)
4. Paul Auster (6)
4. Ann Pratchett (6)
4. Bonnie Jo Campbell (6)
5. Elizabeth Strout (5)
5. Dave Eggers (5)
5. David Mitchell (5)
5. Anita Diamant (5)
5. Marilynne Robinson (5)
5. Zadie Smith (5)
5. Geraldine Brooks (5)
5. Colleen McCullough (5)
5. Mary Doria Russell (5) (She's written 6 books - 2 sci fi, 2 westerns, and 2 historical fiction)
5. David McCullough (5) (all non-fiction)
What a cool feature! Here's mine - it sounds like me to me! It's an awful lot of white guys. My reading as a whole is much more diverse, but a lot of the authors don't have a big body of work yet.author books read
1 Jonathan Lethem 8
1 Michael Chabon 8
3 David Mitchell 7
3 Salman Rushdie 7
5 Margaret Atwood 6
5 Matt Ruff 6
5 Daniel Woodrell 6
8 Jeff VanderMeer 5
8 Jess Walter 5
I was a little surprised Neil Gaiman wasn't up near the top. He is tied with Margaret Atwood who follows Barbara Kingsolver.1 1077326 J.K. Rowling 8
2 1074866 Alan Bradley 7
2 10015 Kate Atkinson 7
4 1169504 A.S. Byatt 6
4 3075 John Irving 6
4 3541 Barbara Kingsolver 6
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1 William Faulkner 22
2 Terry Pratchett 16
3 Brian K. Vaughan 11
3 Stephen King 11
5 Jim Thompson 10
5 Neil Gaiman 10
5 Cormac McCarthy 10
5 Salman Rushdie 10
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I ran my list. Like others above, it includes several names from my pre-GR reading days. I was surprised (but pleased) to see a majority of women authors, and a small mix of dead and alive. 1 Charles Dickens 10
2 J.K. Rowling 7
3 Irène Némirovsky 6
3 Katherine Mansfield 6
5 Philip Pullman 5
5 Anita Brookner 5
5 Sebastian Faulks 5
8 Andrea Levy 4
8 Richard Flanagan 4
8 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 4
8 Barbara Kingsolver 4
8 Margaret Atwood 4
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Ali Smith, José Saramago, John Banville, Josef Škvorecký 11
J.M. Coetzee, Angela Carter, Pat Barker, Penelope Fitzgerald 10
Italo Calvino, Isabel Allende, Arthur Ransome*, Haruki Murakami, Penelope Lively, Doris Lessing 9
Jeanette Winterson, Kazuo Ishiguro, Virginia Woolf, Colm Tóibín, Andrew Greig, Orhan Pamuk, Hermann Hesse 8
~
At the bottom of my list, 3 books each starts at 91st place and is clearly an incomplete list of enough to make up a supposed top 100.
I suspect that if page count were used to order the list, the results would be very different - I have only read 2 by Tolstoy but they were War and Peace and Anna Karenina.
*the only one that was a favourite in childhood, and I am not 100% sure exactly which ones I read.
Love lists! So here's mine:1. Agatha Christie 67 ( really love her but don't know if there aren't some duplicates in there since some books are published under two different titles. Still I've been reading her since I'm 14 and that's a very long time.
2. Henry James 17 (I didn't think he wrote that many books so I don't know how accurate the is)
3. Doris Lessing 31
4. Anthony Trollope 27
5. Haruki Murakami 15
I don't think this can be accurate since it looks like I've read more books than some of the writers have written. Still, I know these do reflect writers I've read a lot of.
But I when I joined GR I listed all the books I could remember reading and this no longer really represents my favorite authors (except for Christie and Murakami, both of whom I really think I've read most if not all of.
It leaves off Jane Austen and Tana French and so many other authors I now love. Also there are books like Rebecca that only count as one but that I've read and reread repeatedly.
Ooh--fun! Thanks for pointing out this feature. Here's mine:Margaret Atwood - 10
Jane Austen - 6
Edgar Allen Poe - 5
Edith Wharton - 5
Virginia Woolf - 5
Stephen King - 4
Fyodor Dostoyevsky - 4
I was glad to see Atwood, my favorite, at the top. Poe was a surprise, but I think it's because of short stories. There was a bunch at 3 that I consider some of my favorite authors.
This tells me that, while I often say I want to read everything an author I like has written, clearly I don't go do that! Will be interesting to see how this changes over time--maybe this should be an annual check every springtime.
I only entered a few old books I'd read when I joined GR, but I have to go back and add Jane Austen - can't have the list without her!
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I'm like you, Kathleen, I also say I want to read everything by certain authors, but I don't want to do it all at once! :D
Marc wrote: "17 Byatts--imressive, Hugh! (I've yet to read a single one.) Just read The Sea, the Sea as my first Murdoch and absolutely loved it.Robert, have you read any of Dahl's adult work? He..."
I'd forgotten about Dahl's short stories for adults. Certainly not for children! I read them as a teenager - we would all egg each other on to read them, as a dare. Some are really creepy. They did a TV series of the best of them in the UK - years ago. Can't remember the name, although I still remember the theme music!
Tales of the Unexpected (Paul mentioned them above).
Neil wrote: "Tales of the Unexpected (Paul mentioned them above)."Thank you! - just read Paul's post as well.
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Mildly embarrassed, and I too ticked every single book I could ever recall reading when I joined GR. Many of these are openly genre or chick-lit or a-book-a-year authors. One of my reasons for joining this group in particular was to discover books outside these categories. And at the same time, I would gladly pick up a new book from any of these authors (with the sad exceptions of those who have passed - Sue Grafton, Elmore Leonard, Colleen McCullough).
For years, Elmore Leonard was my "go to" beach read - before switching to John Grisham for the beach.
And I'm a little proud to note the high percentage of female authors on my list.
John Grisham 32
Sue Grafton 26
Patricia Briggs 18
Eileen Wilks 14
Jennifer Weiner 14
Elmore Leonard 11
Seanan McGuire 10
Barbara Kingsolver 10
Emily Giffin 8
Philippa Gregory 8
Joshilyn Jackson 8
Steve Hamilton 8
Colleen McCullough 7
Margaret Atwood 7
After looking at my list and the previous comments, it occurred to me to make a list of favorite authors meaning "I'll read anything this person has written". Still thinking.
This discussion has be thinking about my favorite authors. I realized I could not come up with a short list of favorites. The list keeps growing as I discover new authors. While I have not read some authors for years, there are memories associated with them that requires me to keep them as favorites (such as John D. MacDonald and his Travis McGee series that my father, my sister, and I all read at the same time, until my dad died and missed the last 2 or 3). I do collect a few authors, but there are authors I equally enjoy that I do not collect (the space problem, you know). It would be just to come up with a list of favorite books! Perhaps most meaningful would work better?
Marc wrote: "So with all this data being collected for each of us, it's important to stop and smell the data points. Go to the top of the GR page and click MY BOOKS.
Then scroll down the left side under the s..."
1. Wm Faulkner
2. Kurt Vonnegut
3. John Steinbeck
4. Henry James
5. Mark Twain
Maggie wrote: "After looking at my list and the previous comments, it occurred to me to make a list of favorite authors meaning "I'll read anything this person has written". Still thinking."I was thinking something similar. After reading The Heart's Invisible Furies, I may have a John Boyne binge soon. Maybe a book every month or so. I don't like to read one author back to back - all the books run together for me if there's not a little gap.
And so many people love J.M. Coetzee, I may need to give him another try.
This is fun! Here are my top "five":1. Neil Gaiman 13
2. Charles Dickens 12
3. Terry Pratchett 10
3. Georgette Heyer 10
5. Brian K. Vaughan 7
5. Joe Hill 7
Like a couple of others here, Gaiman, Vaughan and Hill are up there because of graphic novel series. Dickens, Pratchett and Heyer are all current projects as I work through their novels, and I can certainly call them favorites of mine.
Some of my other favorites are ones where I just have not worked my way through as many of their novels yet (Hardinge, Mitchell, French, PKD). Bolano is listed as 5 because when I read 2666, I rated each part separately. I would also list Christopher Priest as a favorite, but he flew just under the radar at 4 books so far.
Authors with 6 each: Frances Hardinge, Jane Austen, Gene Wolfe, David Mitchell
Authors with 5 each: John Updike, Tana French, Lemony Snicket, Emily Giffin, Philip K. Dick, Roberto Bolaño, Jeff VanderMeer
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Thanks for bringing this up, Carissa! You also reminded me that if you go to someone else's bookshelf, at the top (right next to the smaller search) is a "Compare Books" option--GR will tell you how many books you and another user have in common. Apparently, you and I have 17% in common, which is pretty darn high from what I've seen here on GR.
Sue wrote: "Maggie wrote: "After looking at my list and the previous comments, it occurred to me to make a list of favorite authors meaning "I'll read anything this person has written". Still thinking."I was..."
I'm with you on the Boyne binging...after 'Heart's', I immediately read his 'A History of Loneliness', which was also a 5-star read for me, and have added several others to my TBR lists.
I added my Jane Austens this morning.....I wonder how long it will take the stats to catch up....
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Have fun, Carissa. :D
I wasn't surprised at all. My "most read" are actually listened to! I always have a book that I don't have to pay a lot of attention to on the CD player, be it while I'm driving, cooking cleaning, etc. I realize I don't have favorite authors as much as favorite books.
carissa wrote: "I did notice that if someone has their profile public, you can check-out other people's most read and stats..."The introvert in me loves this feature - to be able to browse the bookshelves of an unknown someone who wrote a review I especially appreciated. No need to 'friend' or announce yourself - you can just flit in like a little invisible library fairy ;) I hope I've hosted some invisible guests!
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Marc wrote: "Whenever someone I don't know sends me a friend request on GR, I first see if they're just trying to get me to read the book they wrote, and then I compare books (the comparison doesn't really impa..."I have never noticed the book compatibility test either. I tried it with a few of my friends and noticed that it uses the same standard group of books in each category each time. So it's comparing you on commonly read books, not necessarily books either person has read.
I also use the compare books feature when someone sends a friend request. If we aren't in a group together or have virtually no books in common, I find the friend request an odd thing and might ignore it.
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I was trying to figure out just now what was up with the standard group of books, so your explanation was perfectly timed! Yeah, if someone hits you up and doesn't have any books, groups, or friends in common, it always seems a little odd (although, sometimes if people are brand new to GR, they hit up the first people they happen to see, I think).
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The Book Compatibility Feature definitely needs some work.
Whitney wrote: "I don't accept many friend requests, and definitely not ones from people who I haven't engaged with in groups.. I think some people like to collect 'friends' just to beef up their numbers. I've see..."People actually do that???? ( diss GR followers on other social platforms)
regarding friends - If someone has a Maltese surname I will accept automatically - since we're a tiny island with a low literacy rate, the possibility is that I'll know that person adding me.
Other than that I usually check for similar books or if the friends are similar to mine - Usually I notice if a booktuber likes one of my reviews the friend requests come pouring in, which I usually accept.
The ones who comment and like my posts are the ones from the three GR groups I am in though.
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#, Author, Count, Pages
1, A.S. Byatt, 17, 5962
2, Iris Murdoch, 16, 5631
3, Salman Rushdie, 12, 4775
4, Adam Thorpe, 12, 4301
5, Jonathan Coe, 12, 4057
6, Orhan Pamuk, 8, 3680
7, Josef Škvorecký, 11, 3669
8, Julian Barnes, 15, 3532
9, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, 5, 3446
10, Milan Kundera, 12, 3376
11, Isabel Allende, 9, 3360
12, Arthur Ransome, 9, 3257
13, David Mitchell, 7, 3182
14, José Saramago, 11, 3124
15, Haruki Murakami, 9, 3069
16, Gabriel García Márquez, 12, 3042
17, Ali Smith, 11, 3007
18, Andrew Greig, 8, 2927
19, Thomas Hardy, 6, 2926
20, John Banville, 11, 2886
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No, sorry - that was a little unclear. I meant Twitter users ridiculing how few followers other Twitter users have. I was just using it as an example of how people get validation from their number of friends/followers on social media sites.
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21st Century Literature
Books mentioned in this topic
The Heart's Invisible Furies (other topics)The Sea, the Sea (other topics)
The Sea, the Sea (other topics)
The Sea, the Sea (other topics)
The Best of Roald Dahl (other topics)
Authors mentioned in this topic
John Boyne (other topics)J.M. Coetzee (other topics)
Lois McMaster Bujold (other topics)
Go to the top of the GR page and click MY BOOKS.
Then scroll down the left side under the shelves you named until you see a subsection called YOUR READING ACTIVITY.
Then click on MOST-READ AUTHORS.
Share with us your top five most-read authors.
- Is this list accurate (sometimes GR counts multiple editions)?
- Does it reflect your favorite authors or just some of the most-productive ones?
- Any surprises?