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Completeists--Are You One Or Are You Attempting To Be One? (5/19/19)
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Marc
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May 20, 2019 10:36AM
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There are also a couple for whom I have read everything that is currently available in English in Olga Tokarczuk and Magda Szabo.
Calvino may be on the list but I am not 100% sure as it depends on whether you count Italian Folk Tales, and maybe W.G. Sebald though that depends on what is classified as fiction.
I would like to add Iris Murdoch but still have 9 of her 26 novels to go. Others I may add eventually include Andrei Makine, Penelope Lively, Virginia Woolf, Jose Saramago, Muriel Spark, Pat Barker, Mike McCormack, Dostoyevksky, George Eliot, Richard Powers, Thomas Bernhard, I could go on....
I was also quite close to completing Marquez but never read his last one and may have missed a story collection.
I am adding to this list rather than adding further comments! Also discovering that some of my supposed completists wrote more than I thought. In many cases I am ignoring non-fiction, and for some also poetry and/or children's books.
I'm a completest - If I like an author, I will read everything. Preferably from the first novel - i love the way a style develops
I'm the opposite of a completist. It's stupid but I purposefully leave unread at least one book by a favorite author, so I still have the pleasure to look forward to of reading a book by that author for the first time. For instance I've read Middlemarch and Adam Bede maybe a dozen times each but not yet Mill on the Floss or Daniel Deronda. I keep re-reading The Magic Mountain and not reading Dr. Faustus. I'm saving all the W.G. Sebald novels except for Austerlitz which I've read four times now. This practice is ridiculous and maybe even a bit superstitious, I know, but it made me so sad when I finally read Northanger Abbey and had no more Jane Austen novels left to read for the first time.
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I am not a completist by design, but years ago (when I read a lot less in general than I do now) I got into Kurt Vonnegut and read all his books. I also read most of Italo Calvino then and expect to eventually read the rest, not for the sake of completion but because I've loved all his work.A few years ago I decided as a project to read all of Shakespeare's plays - one per week over the course of a year. That's the only time I made a conscious decision to be a compleist about an author (but even there, I have not read much of his poetry).
I don't know what the minimum amount a person has to have written for being a comletist to be meaningful, but I have read all of Ottessa Moshfegh's published work. That's around 20 short stories, one novella, and one novel so far. She's one of the few authors I would look for to read anything new by her right away. I've also read 4 of 5 novels by Naomi Alderman and will read the other one sometime soon.
In general I'm not a completist because there are more books I want to read than there is time to ever read them all, so giving any preference to a book because I happen to have read a lot of others by that author doesn't motivate me. Multiple books by Faulkner, Dickens, Conrad, and Dostoevsky are among my favourites, yet I have not read a lot of books by each of them and might not ever get around to reading them.
Much of most obsession over being a completist comes from my love of book collecting. I love a set or a series, or the complete works of an author.As a result I have read and collected the complete works of several authors over many years. Ian McEwan was the first, then Chatwin and Rushdie, and later came Faulks, Barnes, Ishiguro and Lanchester. Theses all had their origins in an English childhood, but more recently I had also gathered John Berger, Alex Miller, Tim Winton, John Irving, Siri Hustvedt and Paul Auster. Along the way I have also gathered most of A S Byatt and Graham Greene.
The great thing about this sort of collecting/obsession is that when you discover a new author that you enjoy, you have a whole new outlet for your collecting mania.
I am not even close to a completist. I was sure I'd never read everything by one author until I saw David's post and realized I was on a Kurt Vonnegut craze, too, a couple of decades ago. After that, I read everything by Herman Hesse. But in the last 15 years, I've read whatever literary fiction and some genre fiction that is new and looks interesting, without regard to author. The only exception I can think of is Barbara Kingsolver. When her latest book came out, I read it because of who she is. I considered Groff's new work, but I don't like short story collections. In general, I don't go back and read the author's previous work even when I like the book I'm reading. Looks like I'm in the minority.
No way am I "completist." These days, it is hard enough to get me to complete a book (beginning and end, surely, the middle, only if deserving -- well, I'm being a bit hyperbolic, but you get the idea of my impatience at this point in my life), let alone the oeuvre of a single author. Yet, I do recognize what a rich experience that must be -- and wish (my) life had had enough time for that. And there are several authors of whom I have read a number of their works -- not Shakespeare, unfortunately.... (I have enjoyed every performance of Shakespeare I have seen, including both some good acting and some tough stagings.)
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Marc wrote: "Marcus, my aunt and I got each other some favorite books this past Christmas. She was supposed to pick ONE of her favorites for me to read. Instead, she bought me ALL of Chatwin, whom I've never read!"What a wonderful gift! Marc you are lucky that some of his books are quite slim. My favourite would be Utz.
David wrote: "I am not a completist by design, but years ago (when I read a lot less in general than I do now) I got into Kurt Vonnegut and read all his books. I also read most of Italo Calvino then and expect t..."Two novels - eileen and my year... : )
I am a wannabe completist, but the only author whose books I've completed is Jane Austen, and felt much like Lark describes above--a melancholy when I finished the last book, kind of like reaching a milestone age.I imagine it is a fun feeling when the author is still living and writing, like when I used to get every new album by a favorite recording artist.
I do have a list of authors I'd like to try to complete: Margaret Atwood, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Charles Dickens, Joseph Campbell, Pablo Neruda, James Baldwin, George Eliot … I'd better stop now.
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Hmm... Maybe I'll save that one for last. I wasn't going to read them in any particular order unless you'd advise otherwise, Marcus.
For every one-book author any of us has read, I suppose we're completists!
Robert wrote: "David wrote: "I am not a completist by design, but years ago (when I read a lot less in general than I do now) I got into Kurt Vonnegut and read all his books. I also read most of Italo Calvino the..."Ha! Of course, you're right (and I have read both novels). I got so distracted by not counting the book of short stories as a novel and referring to McGlue as a novella rather than counting it as a novel I messed up the actual number. Thanks for the correction!
Marc wrote: "For every one-book author any of us has read, I suppose we're completists!"I was going to make a joke earlier that having read Wuthering Heights that I am an Emily Brontë completist. I have read it four times, so if you ever ask if we have read any author's oeuvre multiple times, I have this one.
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I used to read Lord of the Rings every summer holiday - I reckon I got to 12 times before I grew out of it. I tried to become a Tolkien completist, but, to be honest, I got bored.I have read all of Richard Powers, all of Thomas Pynchon and most of Don Delillo and Ali Smith and Deborah Levy and Kazuo Ishiguro. I would like to complete all of those.
I think there are others but they escape my mind at the moment.
There are some contemporary writers that I really enjoy and read most if not all of what they write: Mary Doria Russell, Geraldine Brooks, Tony Horwitz (not to be confused with Anthony Horowitz), David McCullough, Robin Oliveira, Anthony Marra, Robert Harris.
Marc wrote: "Any book you can enjoy four times is priceless! I'm trying to think if I can say that about any book... Hmm.. Possibly, I've read If on a Winter's Night a Traveler four times. I think..."I think Wuthering Heights is the only book I have read four times, and the most recent reading was a couple of months ago. If on a winter's night a traveller, Absaom, Absalom, The Secret Agent, and The Razor's Edge are (I think) the only books I have read three times and I expect to read each one again eventually.
I'm not sure how many times I can say I have read Crime and Punishment. I would probably count it as 3 as well, but one of those times was when I was working on adapting it as a play script, so there were multiple re-readings of most of the book going on during that process. Then there is Tender is the Night, which I read only once, but the way I read it was to read every chapter 3 times over, so it's sort of like reading it three times. But I've gotten WAY off track now....
I feel like I should read some of these authors that I've never read that you guys have read all of... Even my favorite authors where I've read most of their books I'm still missing a few.
Hi group - I think this is the first time I've posted here, I'm Ella. This topic really interests me - mostly why do I feel the need to be a completionist for some authors over others, even some writers who have written things I absolutely adore?The only authors I can claim real completion for are Zadie Smith (new book coming out later this year, btw), Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, Cynthia Ozick, Marilynne Robinson, Richard Powers, David Mitchell (and one book by the other David Mitchell - I'm a completionist of watching all of his comedy work, including time spent on silly tv panels though) and David Foster Wallace. I used to be able to include Haruki Murakami, but I haven't read the last two books he published in English (or any of the ones only published in Japanese.) I'm pretty close on quite a few others, and hopefully I'll get there eventually. These include Paul Auster, Salmon Rushdie, Mark Leyner, Lori Moore and a few others I know I have like one more book to read. (I saved, for instance, Muriel Spark's Memento Mori for last, and I plan to get to that this year.) Once upon I time there were others to whom I was devoted, but my tastes seem to have changed.
Actually, I would have to check, but I'm guessing I've read all or almost all of Jane Austen, Margaret Atwood, Virginia Woolf and Thomas Pynchon too. Not sure. I know I've read all of Armistead Maupin's fiction, but I don't have a whole lot of interest in the lives of the authors I read (or the musicians I listen to, actually.)
I started realizing just how silly this particular OCD-ish trait is when I forced myself through Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity by David Foster Wallace in the massive dump that came after his death. I read it, but I claim zero real understanding of what I read. Being a completionist seemed to require a few advanced degrees in subjects I have no interest in, so I realized just how silly the whole project was.
I can't claim completion b/c I've never checked, but there are some espionage writers I'm sure I've read all of, including Len Deighton and John le Carré and maybe some others, but I can't really be sure without spending a lot of time trying to figure it out.
ETA == oh, and as a kid, I real all of Salinger, (understood not nearly enough, so I'm rereading as an adult, save Catcher), Laura Ingalls Wilder, the Hardy Boys & Nancy Drew, and SE Hinton. I lived for SE Hinton books as a kid.
wow, Ella. I'm very interested in you being a Cynthia Ozick completist especially. I love everything I've read of hers ("The Shawl," Heir to the Glimmering World, and essays Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays) but she seems neglected.Also kudos for Richard Powers completion. Wow. I have a lot of good intentions about reading all his books.
I admire everyone’s ability to focus so much. There is no plan in my reading and my mind wanders around.I read all kinds of books and genres in and from different languages. Completing an author has never been my goal as there are so many to read....The older I get, the more I regret time will be too short to read everything on my list.
I did however read almost all the work of Louis Couperus , Iris Murdoch Heinrich Böll and Pablo Neruda when I was younger.
I think I read almost all mysteries by Agatha Christie Ngaio Marsh and others like them for a class in library school.
And of course there are the classics..there are a few left, but most I read at university.
And every Asterix too, of course:-)
Lark wrote: "wow, Ella. I'm very interested in you being a Cynthia Ozick completist especially. I love everything I've read of hers ("The Shawl," Heir to the Glimmering World, and essays [book:Cri..."Interestingly, it was being a DFW completionist that turned me on to her work. He praised her to the heavens when he was alive, and I made a note while watching an interview. That led me to one of the most interesting writers I've read.
This happens a lot. I see a writer I like praising some other writer's work (DFW was a huge Powers fan too, but I'd found Powers before I knew that. You can see the influence of The Gold Bug Variations in particular in Infinite Jest).
It's not so much that I want to be completionist. It's more that I get super excited about reading a writer and start reading everything I can from that person. When it stops being exciting, I usually hang in for a couple more books to see if it was temporary, but I will stop preordering and eventually fall out of the loop.
I am glad so many books are now being translated - it's opened me up to a huge variety of books I couldn't have read otherwise, and given me a bunch of writers to get excited about. Also I'm old and have had a lot of time to read.
Regarding Lark's comment about being the opposite of a completionist: John Irving wrote - I think in Saving Piggy Sneed - that he loved Dickens so much that he had left one book unread for the same reason Lark has. I plan to do this with Dickens, Powers, Greene and a few other authors.And, speaking of Irving, I fully expected to read all of his books. Then something happened - somewhere around The Fourth Hand - which I couldn't finish. I tried a couple more. Now I don't even try.
There are authors I think I've read everything they've written or at least all the fiction and there are authors whose fiction all sits on my shelves but yet to be completed. I've seen some already listed - Jenny Epenbach, Barbara Kingsolver, Marilynne Robinson, Richard Powell, Paul Astor, Ali Smith, Zadie Smith, David Mitchell. Some not listed are Cormac McCarthy, John Connolly, Ann Patchett, Monica Wood, Sarah Paretsky, James Baldwin, Robert Heinlein. There are some prolific writers of series where I've only read one of their many different series. I find that I am less of a completist the older I get and since I started reading translations.
Maggie wrote: "I plan to do this with Dickens, Powers, Greene and a few other authors...."Maggie I'm so happy to know I'm not the only one. To me it feels kind of like extreme unction, to commit to reading that last-ever book.
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For you who are completists, have you plowed your way through books you weren't really enjoying just for the sake of reading everything by a favorite author? Or have you found enough to make it worth it in even in lessor works?
Whitney wrote: "I'm no completest, there are even a few authors I've stopped one or two books short of their entire oeuvre (eg. Faulkner, Vonnegut, Dostoevsky - three writers that have come up repeatedly) because ..."Definitely the latter. I think you like an author there's some loyalty involved. However there's always the exception and for me that's Martin Amis- he lost me completely with Yellow Dog and I haven't read anything by him since.
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Both can be true - it depends on the author, but if too many are disappointing I will stop reading. Before joining GR I was more likely to read a lot of books by the same author in a shorter time, but these days there are too many reading commitments for that.
Whitney wrote: "For you who are completists, have you plowed your way through books you weren't really enjoying just for the sake of reading everything by a favorite author? Or have you found enough to make it worth it in even in lessor works?"I'm not a completist either, with the exception of my Shakespeare read a few years back. The idea of being a completist just for the sake of it is a motivation I cannot relate to at all. But I also think there can be good reasons to plow through books that aren't good.
When I was in high school, I asked my English teacher if Shakespeare ever wrote anything that wasn't good. All you usually ever hear about is how great he was, so I was curious if all the plays were good. He told me to read Titus Andronicus. I was hooked by the introductory critical commentary in the copy I got that told the reader that this was, indeed, not a good play, but how it was important to Shakespeare's development as a writer. I read it and agreed. It was awful, but all the more fascinating for it.
It was with the memory of that experience and also from noticing that there are about a dozen or so Shakespeare plays that people talk about all the time and another dozen or so that rarely are talked about that I wanted to be able to see for myself just how much was great (any buried gems?) and how much was not (Titus Andronicus 2: The Quickening maybe?). It helped to get through the low points (King John is a bore) that each play was a short read, and there were a few gems I knew nothing about before reading them.
Whitney wrote: "For you who are completists, have you plowed your way through books you weren't really enjoying just for the sake of reading everything by a favorite author? Or have you found enough to make it worth it in even in lessor works?"I agree with Hugh - if it stops being a good experience, I stop reading eventually. It was very sad for me, with Wallace, to try to read that thesis - and stupid too. I knew I wouldn't care about it, and so I felt like I needed to go back and read earlier work to sort of cleanse my palate and remember why I liked his work so much. But that is the case of an author dying and the publisher and I going mutually insane. I wanted a copy of all his books. I didn't really need to read all of them. (And I have a personal ethical complaint about "This Is Water" - I'm sure he'd never have allowed that if he'd been alive. So I refuse to buy that.)
Many of the authors I love are alive, so their books are hopefully the books they want to publish. One way I immediately stop being a completionist is memoir. I don't really want to read a memoir of a writer whose fiction I love. I adore essays and nonfiction, just not a memoir per se.
So long as we're talking essays, stories, novels etc, I will hang in through a book or two that may not be my thing because often it's interesting to see an author change or go through some trial and error. Sometimes, in light of later work, I find a book I didn't love sort of falls into place, and I understand it better/appreciate it more after some time. This is akin to when a band changes their sound - often it's jarring at first, but they need to do it to keep growing, and once my ear gets used it it, I usually appreciate the change.
It's fascinating to follow the growth of a writer, and that's why when I find an author I really love, after reading a few current books, I may go back to the earliest work and read my way through. I do this for most authors I like, and sometimes it just ends up that I've become a completionist. Someone mentioned Ottessa Moshfegh -- I liked both of her books, so I'll read her next. That's how this stuff starts. Whether I'll be a Moshfegh completionist someday, who knows? I will, however, read her next book.
I don't do it for the sake of completion. I do it to read books I love. I get really excited when one of my favorite authors has a new book coming out. I carve out a couple days around the release date so I can read the book. It's not about being complete - it's that I like the author's work enough to want to read what they write.
Sometimes that stops being the case, though. And I stop the date-making and preorders. It's a little bit sad, but I can't adore every single writer or read every book by every author I admire (though I would like to try - and I'm looking forward to retirement when maybe I move to the north of Scotland and read until I die.)
David wrote: "Titus Andronicus 2: The Quickening ..."Good one
This thread got me thinking that I should read earlier works by authors I like. So I went to the library and picked up several of Barbara Kingsolver's books. I'm reading her debut book The Bean Trees from 1988 and loving it. The story is great. It's fascinating to me to see the transformation in her writing. She goes from first person, present tense in her debut, so that you really get into the character's head, to being more didactic in her later works and less interested in individual characters. I'm glad you posted this comment Marc. It shook me out of a rut.
Hugh wrote: "One other recent completion I didn't mention is the list of Booker winners. Completions, which often take years, are usually secondary to other reading goals, which are often socially driven."If you look at being a completionist as reading a list of prize winners or nominated prize winners, then I'm more of a completionist than I thought. I read every Women's Prize for Fiction book and I'm glad I did. I made myself slog through two novels on the list just so I could say I read them all.
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Erin wrote: "I made myself slog through two novels on the list just so I could say I read them all."That's a motivation that seems entirely alien to me. I can understand if you thought there might be some other value to slogging through the books, but just to say you did it is something I don't understand. Reasons to slog through books you don't like I can relate to include having a desire to understand a particular author better, so you read their slog books as well as their good ones. Or even a desire to better understand how prize winners are chosen, so you slog through the listed books you don't like as well as the ones you do. But in those cases there is a difference between wanting to read the books (despite the slog) and wanting to be able to say you read them.
In this sense of the word, I am really not one, but I am interested in reading all of the works of some authors - Jane Austen and Amy Tan come to my mind.
Like many others, I think I’ve completed Italo Calvino. I e definitely completed a number of the usual classics: Austen, Alcott, the Brontes... I’ve read all of Terry Pratchett too. Currently working on Pat Barker. How did I not discover her until last year?! Other completist goals: Denis Johnson, Angela Carter, Charles Dickens.
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I used to only have 4 or 5 such authors, but my list has ballooned to something like 20 or so authors. Some of them only have a couple books, so it's not too big a task.
She is phenomenal, Mark. I’ve read 4 of hers in the past week and a half. (Yay quarantine!!) The Regeneration Trilogy is a an absolute masterpiece and I can not recommend it enough.
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I was going to claim "I'm not a completist!" Then I looked at my goodreads Favorite Authors, oops.I've read just about everything in print by:
Brian Evenson
Dennis Cooper
Patricia Duncker
Joy Williams (except an early book or two)
Kenzaburo Oe (except one or two recent novels)
Samuel Delany (except the latest novel, probably skipping)
Bo Huston (died young, only a few books)
Tom Reamy (ditto)
I read Barker’s Blow Your House Down last night. I was unsure about her early works, but it’s a really interesting little book. It looks like the forthcoming book is a sequel to The Silence of the Girls. I skipped (avoided) the Greek classics, but really loved The Silence of the Girls. But yes, the Greek retellings have been done to death.
Bill wrote: "I've read just about everything in print by:Kenzaburo Oe (except one or two recent novels)"
I'm also a Kenzaburo Oe completist as well - except as an English speaker I'm not. I've read everything translated but a lot of his work (50%?) - including some of the key novels cited by the Committee when he won the Nobel Prize - haven't been.
Others for me would be José Saramago, Haruki Murakami, Thomas Bernhard, Javier Marias, Milan Kundera, Gabriel García Márquez. Salman Rushdie, Orhan Pamuk, Andrei Makine, WG Sebald and Kazuo Ishiguro
And yes there is a rather worrying gender imbalance there which I'm trying to correct in my more recent reading. These were novelists I read extensively 10+ years ago although where they are still writing I would read their new books.
New favourites/completists would include Isabel Waidner, Han Kang, Bae Suah, Olga Tokarczuk and Jesse Ball albeit the first 4 are again limited in what is available.
Paul wrote: "I'm also a Kenzaburo Oe completist as well - except as an English speaker I'm not. I've read everything translated..."Sorry, I should have clarified that all my Oe reading has been in English. I didn't realize there's so much that hasn't been translated, wow.
21st Century Literature
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