I can't think of a single author I've read who isn't guilty of this, regardless of genre or literary merit.

I just tried to answer this on the other thread. Possible exceptions: Dickens, Melville.

kinda sorta true!

Ian Fleming. Lesley Thomas. Graham Masterton.

Ayn Rand.

Just fucking with y'all.

Catherine Cookson scores for Dan too.

This is pretty tricky.

Are we talking stylistically, or subject matter wise?

murakami ftw

Gilbert Sorrentino? Maybe? Imaginitive Qualities of Actual Things=Very different from Mulligan Stew or The Sky Changes.

Damn I take too long with my replies. Here's what I wrote anyway, despite what mookieproof says!

I tend to think it is kinda true too but it doesn't really matter. When I read one of my favourite authors say Murakami or Sebald then sure they all have the same kind of...er...shtick, but because I like that I tend to not mind. In Sebald's case I could quite happily have read the same novel over and over again. And because there are so few I have too. sigh.

People like Lesley Thomas and Graham Masterton are exceptions to this rule for sure because they're kind of hacky and do books in several genres. I'd say a lot of writers who are into getting paid as much as/more than "art" are probly flexible like this.

...nabokov?

Murakami does write about different things but they all have the same kind of feel and much of the same...erm...fuckit I don't want to say mis en scene because you'll take me to task (rightly) but I think that what's I mean. Milieu maybe?

Nabokov is a good one.

yep, nabokov

Nabokov wrote two books over and over, one in Russian and one in English.

Nabakov is dead on. Ghost Rider wins.

pale fire is tooooooooooooooooootaly different from lolita and/or pnin, brah

Pynchon?

I was just being pithy, "brah."

I think Pale Fire and Lolita have plenty in common, but Lolita and, say, Bend Sinister are pretty different.

(n/a: sorry, i'm an idiot)

Tommy P. pretty much writes the same book over and over.

Tommy P. - haha like it - I'll call him that next time we have drinks.

So, what other writers totally do do this?

daerest haruki--enough with the missing girlfriend/wife/mother!

Isn't this thread kinda cruising toward pointing out that most successful writers have, umm ... recognizable styles?

Nabokov for sure. Plus Moorcock, Naguib Mahfouz, Julio Cortazar, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Jose Saramago, Alfred Bester, Steve Aylett, Italo Calvino... man there are so many

(And coherent subject matter, and ongoing thematic concerns?)

I was going to say ... stylistically, Nabokov does the same thing over and over. He doesn't exactly have any books where the narrator is a monosyllabic idiot man-child, and he likes to use the same tricks over and over (hello unreliable narrator). However, when you're Nabokov, I think this tendency is a pro, not a con.

Also I'm not sure Pynchon does really. Gravitys Rainbow vs Mason and Dixon?

What about William Gaddis as someone who doesn't?

What mookieproof says is true - I'm blinded by my love of him to see this.

post Moby Dick Melville may actually be a good example...

Crap, I'm enjoying this but the timers gone on my roast chicken. So I live you with surely the author who did this THE MOST. Ian Fleming.

Moorcock's kinda a funny case though, he likes to tell the same essential story ("The Eternal Champion") in a million different ways, using different genres and styles and POVs depending on the particular work.

many x-posts

It seems clear that to properly answer this question we should probably agree on what constitutes "the same book"

Authors firmly on the Dan side: Irvine Welsh.

xxxpost. Not Ian Fleming. PG Wodehouse.

Ned, From Russia with Love is nuffink like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

"So, what other writers totally do do this?"

you said do do.

haha OTM re: Irvine Welsh

however, I don't think having an identifiable style = "the same book", that seems unnecessarily reductionist

Raold Dahl?

xpost

yeah Joyce switches his style up a lot but I'm sure he was re-writing the same book.

http://www.duranduran.com/bookclub/waspfactory.jpg

http://homepages.compuserve.de/Mostral/pics/03.jpg

http://homepages.compuserve.de/Mostral/pics/g.jpg

http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en/thumb/2/27/200px-IainBanksComplicityEarly.jpg

"I can't think of a single author I've read who isn't guilty of this, regardless of genre or literary merit."

wait, he said that HE'S read. and he only reads goth sci-fi, right?

specifically goth sci-fi with gratuitous scrotum-play

i dont think joyce writes the same book at all!! portrait, ulysses and finnegan's wake all deal w/ the same themes but have totally different takes on those themes and are all written in vastly different styles

Graham Greene!

Ha-ha. Iain Banks. OOOOOOH - a family secret!! I wonder what it is? I'll need to keep reading to find out!

Personally I tend to like authors and filmmakers who repeat themselves. Danny Boyle, for example, makes a lot of different films and most of them are terrible.

john barth

Delillo

wait Delillo is very guilty of writing the same book over and over

I don't think writing in the same niche is a bad thing at all, and Dan is OTM about a lot of authors doing it. Two great ones that come to mind are Faulkner, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Cormac McCarthy. And of course R.L. Stein. :D All of Kafka's actual novels are basically the same book. I'm with Mr. Que on DeLillo.

People who don't do this...uh...Nabokov is definitely one. Maybe Ibsen? Vonnegut? Chekhov?

lol two = three I count good.

The Thin Man is v. different in tone from Dash Hammett's other novels, really, you could never confuse it with Red Harvest or the Maltese Falcon

Vonnegut is sort of writing the same book over and over, it was just a really good book. This does not include Timequake.

DeLillo was one of the ones I'd been thinking about because of Libra and White Noise, but then I thought of others after posting and now withdraw my nomination.

If we aren't involving style here, David Foster Wallace might work, but he hasn't really written enough novels to make a very good case. If we are incorporating style, he fails for sure.

the only reason i jumped at the Delillo thing is I just tried to read The Names, and ugh, that guy's dialogue is sooo lame. His characters use the same syntax and prose as his exposition=boring. I dig Underworld, Libra and White Noise, but I don't know that I can read any more of him.

I tired of DeLillo very quickly for similar reasons

(also it was cuz Great Jones Street = quintessential "writer failing to write well about rock n roll" novel. See also Salman Rushdie, countless others...)

(also it was cuz Great Jones Street = quintessential "writer failing to write well about rock n roll" novel. See also Salman Rushdie, countless others...)

WE HAVE A WINNER FOR BEST ROCK NOVEL

http://www.audio-ideas.com/articles/graphics/bob-dylan-chronicles.jpg

http://images.barnesandnoble.com/images/8480000/8483993.jpg

ALL TIME WINNER BAR NONE.

OH SHIT THATS RIGHT

I keep meaning to read that. For some reason they don't carry it at the big Chicago public library.

Sly's "Off the Record" book pwnz all (that Motley Crue book is a joke - I think someone pointed out on some other thread comparing it to "Please Kill Me" that reading about smart people doing dumb shit is infinitely more entertaining than reading about dumb people doing dumb shit)

Great Jones Street is great.

SHAKEY, THAT IS THE WRONGEST THING YOU HAVE EVER SAID.

stick around I'm sure I can come up with something even wronger

I WASN'T WORRIED ABOUT THAT.

ANYWAY BACK TO YELLING

GREAT JONES STREET SUCKS

I think DeLillo writes very different books that all just happen to converge in the final pages and go "Hahaha GOTCHA, you thought I'd changed my mind about stuff? Same thrust as before, sucka!"

GREAT JONES STREET DOES NOT SUCK

lee child.

i have a friend who estimates he's read about 80 piers anthony books

Thank God I came to my senses befre I turned into that friend (sez the guy with 200+ Doctor Who books).

I've probably read more than 50 PG Wodehouse books. My least favourite are the ones where he isn't re-writing the same old book. That is, the memoirs.

The Dirt is mildly entertaining. I mean, shit, you could read the bestest in its genre, Hammer of the Gods, but the MC bio ain't half bad.

Also, Great Jones Street is fantastic.

Oh yeah, Sylvia Plath. :-P

I had about 30 or 40 Doctor Who books as a child. Most of them are gone now :(

They were very keen on telling you what the speed of light is.

Ned, From Russia with Love is nuffink like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

-- Noodle Vague, Wednesday, 11 July 2007 17:03 (Yesterday) Link

I forgot about that one. I suppose they both have gadgetry in them, and an inventor, and a man on a mission, and, of course, cool cars.

He was Christopher Lee's cousin you know. I tell you this for no good reason.

Even when I was writing that I remembered that Gert Fröbe is in Goldfinger and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, but I thought I'd lie anyway.

Steinbeck? I'd hardly describe Grapes of Wrath and Cannery Row as the same book

All books are basically the same.

looking through my "library" last night, Jonathan Lethem sprang to mind - his novels tend to be radically different from one to the next.

Writers I love who do this but sorta rule even more because of it: Jack Vance, Rex Stout, James Blaylock

Writers I love who don't do this: John Crowley, Gene Wolfe

the only reason i jumped at the Delillo thing is I just tried to read The Names, and ugh, that guy's dialogue is sooo lame. His characters use the same syntax and prose as his exposition=boring. I dig Underworld, Libra and White Noise, but I don't know that I can read any more of him.

Ouch. I just bought a used copy of The Names the other day because it's probably DeLillo's most acclaimed novel that I haven't already read. I found after reading the three others that you named, I haven't really enjoyed him, either. Mao II won the PEN/Faulkner (or maybe the National Book Award), but it struck me as a total caricature of a DeLillo novel.

Has anyone read enough Joyce Carol Oates to know how guilty she is? I mean, you'd think that after writing approximately 500 novels, she'd touch on the same themes repeatedly, but books like We Were the Mulvaneys and Blonde certainly seem different enough.

ugh I couldn't finish Mao II - the book that threw me off DeLillo forever as far as I'm concerned. Is there anything worse than the "genre" of writers writing and writing/academia? Some of the most tedious shit ever.

argh "writers writing ABOUT writing" that should say.

Jonathan Lethem sprang to mind

I was thinking of him, but I guess it depends how far you want to step back. On one hand he genre jumps a lot (noir sci-fi, romance sci-fi, uh, coming-of-age sci-fi!) but on the other his interests (music, pulp, genre fiction) are basically apparent in all his books.

Writers tend to return to certain themes because all writers are writing themselves. Even in widely diverse works, similar themes will be there.

I suspect a lot of writers try not to think about this, and try again and again to write something different. But we are who we are, and what we are, and some things just come up again and again and again, no matter how hard we try to stifle them.

The same is true for writing style, but, to me, to a lesser degree. It's easier to make changes to your style than to your bedrock themes.

It'd be cool if John Updike's next book were like a quick-and-dirty mass-market paperback political thriller.

Luckily, jaymc I only paid like 50 cents for my copy of the Names. I bet it was triggered by the same impulse as you--that New York magazine article a few weeks ago, something along the lines of "What are the best books that no one has ever read," etc etc.

I didn't see that. Link? I've wanted to read it ever since a college professor recommended it in the middle of a harangue about how DeLillo was a much better writer than John Irving (no idea why she thought the two were even worth comparing). I did my oral comps on White Noise.

Palahniuk is WAY guiltier of this than any other writer I can think of.

http://www.lunisea.com/images/AngelsDemonsDanBrown10664_f.jpg

John Irving is fucking horrible!

Ha, you know what? I thought I had read about The Names in this article, but it doesn't seem to be on this list? Maybe it was in this same issue??

http://nymag.com/arts/books/features/2007/32390/

Michael Chabon, maybe - there's relatively little in common in terms of story or theme between the Sherlock Holmes novella & Mysteries of Pittsburgh & Wonder Boys & the new Yiddish/alt-history noir.

Seriously, I thought I was going to be able to endure The Names and just breeze through it, but holy shit that is some bad dialogue.