What author have you read the most books from?

Philip Roth for me..

PKD

Samuel Beckett, probably.

For reference:

Author You’ve Read The Most Books From?

the most indidual books? cos that works against authors with smaller bibliographies

Same OP, heh.

xp

lol indidual

answer to the question as asked is quite possibly Ian Fleming

Without counting or trying too hard to remember, I’m assuming that one of my childhood/early adolescent mainstays like Stephen King or Sara Paretsky still holds the record. These days, I tend not to get as hung up on individual authors; Jonathan Lethem was the last that I got really into in that way, and I still didn’t devour his output the way I did with writers I liked when I was younger (still haven’t even read half of his books).

Most books from = Nabokov

Most books from and about (by which I mean criticism, biographies, etc.) = Woolf

Highest proportion of published output (of decently prolific authors) = John McPhee

actually one of the lads who wrote the novelizations of Doctor Who might be the correct answer

a friend of mine (no, really) has read at least 80 piers anthony books

sebald probably

quickly followed-up by edward st. aubyn who gets by by having a multi-book saga

then didion

Only including books I've read as an adult so as not to end up with "I dunno, who wrote the Saddle Club books?" as an answer.

Most books by: probably Rex Stout
Greatest proportion of published works + works about them: Rudyard Kipling

alice munro

Among novelists I've read most of James, Wharton, Conrad, Eliot, Trollope, Woolf, Cather, Bellow, etc.

Short story writers, yeah, Munro I've read every collection except the earliest.

surely some prolific genre writer i was into as a teen like terry pratchett or agatha christie

I just went and looked on the shelves. Seems I currently have 17 books by or about Vladimir Nabokov, and 15 books by or about Virginia Woolf (though in both cases I have read many more and either got rid of them, mis-shelved them, or had borrowed them from a library).

For McPhee it seems to be 12 (though there is some overlap among collections, and the same caveats apply about how I may have read borrowed copies or library copies or whatever).

PKD

― Bstep, Friday, June 26, 2020 12:20 PM

Whomever out of Dickens, Murakami or Lee Child has written the most as I have read their respective works.

Probably F. Scott Fitzgerald, all in all.

Biggest bodies of work either Proust, Walter Benjamin or Barthes.

McPhee would be my answer to "Which author do you own the most books by that you haven't read?"

Or maybe David Baldacci or Agatha Christie.

Chinaski

Lily Dale, what are you waiting for?

Perhaps an extended period of quarantine?

I'm waiting to develop a passionate interest in geology.

I like McPhee's writing a lot but can't always get interested in the things he's interested in.

Westlake, Wodehouse, Tolkien

Proust is certainly the writer I've spent most time reading, rereading, reading about.

S.E. Hinton was one author I read literally everything by when I was a kid, but that is/was only 5 novels. Don't know if there is any other writer with a significant body of work where I've read everything.

Fair enough, LD.

On looking further it looks like I went through some quasi-completist phases on Margaret Drabble, Joan Didion, Toni Morrison, Faulkner maybe?, Vonnegut, Anne Tyler, Annie Dillard, Donald Barthelme, William Gaddis, Jamaica Kincaid. But many of those authors weren't as prolific and so won't likely crack my top three or four.

Other writers I've tried to read everything by (mostly children's writers): E. Nesbit, Arthur Ransome, Rosemary Sutcliff, Antonia Forest
Authors I'm working on reading my way through but haven't quite made it: Ursula Le Guin, Karel Capek, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Reade
Authors I've read a lot of but will probably never make it all the way through, either because some of their work is crap or because there's just too much of it: Trollope, Faulkner, Russell Hoban, Philip K. Dick, Wilkie Collins, Charlotte M. Yonge

Kerouac, Hesse

Emile Zola or Richard Brautigan. Or if we count my pre-teen days the answer might be Nicholas Fisk or Steve Jackson & Ian Livingstone.

Looking at Nicholas Fisk's bibliography and I remember about ten, so maybe read fifteen. Everything they had in the library anyway, and they had plenty.

yeah see I even read the bad PKD books as I ran out of other options.

Nabokov is probably second cuz also prolific and I was really into those in my 20s

I didn't even think abt kids and YA books or comics, does Charles Schultz count?

as of last year or the year before when i read all her work (minus the autobiography) one after the other it would easily be ngaio marsh at 33 books. after that: i must have read 25+ simenons. also read ridiculous amounts of the output of wodehouse, lawrence, huxley, wyndham lewis, beckett (though minus most of the plays), christina stead, nabokov, dostoevsky & hardy (even the dynasts)

I'd have to count but yeah PKD, Stephen King, Elmore Leonard & Balzac are all in double digits. I'm not going to count the Magic Treehouse books I read to my son.

Including short stories it's probably JG Ballard.

isaac asimov, probably. if we count books for younger readers then it might be beverly cleary. i'm pretty sure i've read most of camus.

there's a lot of lads like Camus where i've read most of them but there just aren't that many. i left out poets because otherwise Larkin or Eliot or Ted Hughes yeah

I've read an awful lot of John Ashbery, both individual volumes and collected

ditto Borges, who, as an author of exclusively short works, has the double distinction of being variously translated *and* variously collected/compiled

Rilke probably the poet I've spent the most time with variant translations of

but if we are defining a "book" as an inalienable unity of pages, then maybe Cesar Aira?

oh yeah, Donald Barthelme's pretty up there too. I think I own 7 of his

Thanks to teenage reading, Philip Jose Farmer, Lester Dent and Agatha Christie.

Another for PKD, largely due to his prodigious output and being completist about it. Having said that, I haven't delved into the couple of really early non-genre novels that have been reissued in the last decade or so. Or the Exegesis lol.

I enjoyed his non-SF Mary and the Giant, written in the early 50s, published in the late 80s, and The Broken Bubble, written in mid-50s, also published in late 80s. Have all the other non-SF novels, I think, and hope to read some day. Confessions of a Crap Artist, finished in at or near the end of the 50s, was the only one published in his lifetime (1975? Think so.) Maybe the first he finished, before Mary..., was Voices From The Street, published in 2007, or thereabouts. Also have Puttering About In A Small Land and In Milton Lumky Territory. I know enough Exegesis stuff from "The Dark-Haired Girl" and so on.

Oh also have (not read) Gather Yourselves Together, written in early 50s, published 1994, I think.

I'm not even sure Shakespeare is worthy of such completest devotion.

7 books, no biggie.

highsmith, westlake or leonard

Highsmith, Herge, Waugh, Greene

That's probably the order of greatness as well

stephen king is a good shout. everything up to delores clairbourne, all the dark tower, second talisman book and full dark, no stars

maybe dickens (all the novels, some of them twice, all the christmas editions, american notes, pictures of italy etc, halfway through 'reprinted pieces' (the longer american edition))

iain banks. all the sf, lots of it multiple times, the first 9 of the non-m books, some of them multiple times.

alastair reynolds, maybe. i count 17 from the official bibliography

ed mcbain, 87th precinct novels, first 18 of those and two more, they are short, especially compared to dickens.

do issues of, say, swamp thing or sandman counts as books?

No

Just had a look through Roald Dahl's bibliography and I have read 18 of those books.

From PKD biblio (thanks, wiki!) *ones I've read

Written Published
1950 Gather Yourselves Together 1994
1952 Voices from the Street 2007
1953 Vulcan's Hammer 1960
1953 Dr. Futurity 1960
1953 The Cosmic Puppets 1957
1954 Solar Lottery 1955
1954 Mary and the Giant 1987*
1954 The World Jones Made 1956
1955 Eye in the Sky 1957
1955 The Man Who Japed 1956
1956 A Time for George Stavros Manuscript lost
1956 Pilgrim on the Hill Manuscript lost
1956 The Broken Bubble 1988*
1957 Puttering About in a Small Land 1985
1958 Nicholas and the Higs Manuscript lost
1958 Time Out of Joint 1959
1958 In Milton Lumky Territory 1985
1959 Confessions of a Crap Artist 1975
1960 The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike 1984
1960 Humpty Dumpty in Oakland 1986
1961 The Man in the High Castle 1962*
LOA1
1962 We Can Build You 1972 First published as A. Lincoln, Simulacrum as a serial in Amazing Stories issues for November 1969 and January 1970.
1962 Martian Time-Slip 1964
1963 Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb
1963 The Game-Players of Titan 1963
1963 The Simulacra 1964
1963 The Crack in Space 1966 as Cantata-140 (1966)
1963 Now Wait for Last Year 1966 LOA2
1964 Clans of the Alphane Moon 1964
1964 The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch 1965*
1964 The Zap Gun 1967*
1964 The Penultimate Truth 1964
1964 Deus Irae 1976 with Roger Zelazny
1964 The Unteleported Man 1966 as Lies, Inc. (1984)
1965 The Ganymede Takeover 1967 with Ray Nelson
1965 Counter-Clock World 1967
1966 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? 1968*
LOA1
1966 Nick and the Glimmung 1988 For children
1966 Ubik 1969*
1968 Galactic Pot-Healer* 1969
1968 A Maze of Death 1970*
1969 Our Friends from Frolix 8 1970
1970 Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said 1974
1973 A Scanner Darkly 1977*
1976 Radio Free Albemuth 1985*
1978 VALIS 1981*
1980 The Divine Invasion 1981*
1981 The Transmigration of Timothy Archer 1982*
1982 The Owl in Daylight Unfinished
So 14 out of 44 published, not that great a ratio, but may well be the most books by single author (runners-up, in terms of books published in their lifetimes and shortly after: Beckett, Orwell).

alice munro

― carin' (map), Friday, June 26, 2020 8:57 PM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

xpost More recently, it's more like reading one or two books by every author I'm interest in (enough to read a whole book, or maybe two).

I’ll count only those writers whose entire output I’ve read or what’s been translated into English:

Roberto Bolaño
Thomas Bernhard
JD Salinger
Amos Tutuola
Karl Ove Knausgaard
Robert Walser
Lydia Davis
Yukio Mishima
Michel Houellebecq

Ok why do yr genre authroids pump out so many books while their literary brethren/sistren produce relatively few?

n.b. I do not mean this as pejorative (in case it sounds that way). Just sayin. There are like a zillion times as many Dick/Asimov books as there are books by, say, Iris Murdoch (who was no slouch).

Good question, impressive answers.

I suspect that my answer is Jonathan Lethem. In front of me I have all the books written by him that I have read (including eg: collections of essays published in other places). The total is 22.

zola and hardy i think

bs johnson, thomas bernhard, yukio mishima

I could give a lot of the same answers, see that Jim Thompson hasn't been listed once and he is one of mine.

Jack Vance

Recently finished reading all 75 Maigret novels by Simenon

Which ones did you like best/least? He kept going with them 'til he quit writing altogether, didn't he? How were the last ones?

Yes, #75 was has last ever novel; after that he dictated 11 memoirs. The books remain very good indeed. Picking favourites is hard. One notable one was Maigret's Memoirs, which feature Simenon in the book as his ghost writer.

For those who’ve read the entirety of an author’s output, how about ranking it? I’ll start with Houellebecq’s novels:

The Elementary Particles
Submission
Whatever
The Map and the Territory
Platform
Serotonin
The Possibility of an Island
Lanzarote

Save comics and children's books like Goscinny & Uderzo, Alan Moore etc, I'm guessing Alasdair Gray

Ok why do yr genre authroids pump out so many books while their literary brethren/sistren produce relatively few?

― zombeekeeper (Ye Mad Puffin), Monday, June 29, 2020 1:30 AM

I think that's what they had to do to make a living. I've seen some authors bristle about this and insist that early novelists used to publish multiple books a year and that one book a year is the most commercial route. I checked Balzac and Trollope's output and it's not as big as I imagined. I think for some it really just comes naturally to them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honor%C3%A9_de_Balzac
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Trollope_bibliography

Adam Roberts wrote a book about Wells and said he might not have taken the project on if he knew how many books Wells had written.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._G._Wells_bibliography

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prolific_writers

It recently dawned on me that I'll need to read much more than 2 books a year by some authors because I don't want it to take my whole life to read all their books.

I think that's what they had to do to make a living. I've seen some authors bristle about this and insist that early novelists used to publish multiple books a year and that one book a year is the most commercial route.

Interesting. I once read a jocular anecdote about a friend of Isaac Asimov calling him on the phone. His wife answered and said, "Sorry, he's just started writing a book," and the friend said, "Okay, I'll just wait till he's finished."

I recently read a biography of Somerset Maugham, who was very cagey about pacing releases to ensure just the right commercial flow - not too much and not too little. I also was interested that he was strategic about demanding large advances - not because he needed the money (he didn't), but because a publisher who has just paid out a large advance is more motivated to promote the book energetically.

Maybe Trollope doesn't have as many books as you'd think because of how long 19th century novels had to be. By his own account he was like a machine: he'd write for a set period of time before going off to work for the postal service, and when he finished writing a book he'd start another one the same day. That's supposed to be a big reason why he didn't really make it into the canon; once his autobiography came out and people found out about his method, they dismissed him as a potboiler-writing hack.

What kind of wealth writers came from might also have something to do with it? But a lot of the most prolific genre authors never slow down even after they become rich.

This from wikipedia
"Pierre Alexis, Viscount of Ponson du Terrail (8 July 1829 – 20 January 1871) was a French writer. He was a prolific novelist, producing in the space of twenty years some seventy-three volumes"

Yeah, there's definitely a thing, at least in 19th century literature, with writers having to turn out endless volumes just to make ends meet. Margaret Oliphant is the classic example; she wrote about 120 books, novels and histories and biographies, plus God knows how many works of semi-anonymous criticism. Virginia Woolf has a famous bit about how "Mrs. Oliphant sold her brain, her very admirable brain, prostituted her culture and enslaved her intellectual liberty in order that she might earn her living and educate her children."

Mary Elizabeth Braddon wrote quite a lot too.

In talking about the 19th century you have to contend with serialization too.

We read Dickens (and a whole bunch of others) as discrete books, whereas their contemporaries would have read in installments, which is a totally different phenomenology of reading!

Right, and not everything that was serialized got collected and reprinted, and a lot of writers published anonymously, so there's this whole amorphous mass of relatively unknown literature floating around under the surface of The Victorian Novel.

Are you guys not including children’s authors in your tallies, because I definitely read all of Roald Dahls books growing up

In no particular order. It think my top authors are probably

Roald Dahl
Terry Pratchett
John LeCarre
Patrick O’Brien

As in I've probably read every book those authors have written

With Dickens, Trollope and Victor Pelevin knocking around probably would take much to get Dumas on the list as well. Peter Carey and Hillary Mantel are definitely in a bubbling under category.

Retreading the thread and acknowledging NV. I think I must have read all the Ian Feeling bond novels as a teenager as well. Should read again.

Harry Mathews

Cool!

he just kept on taking left turns, right up until the end...a real achievement considering how prolific he was

Yes. I read a bunch but think I missed a few.

Had to think about it, but my answer is P. G. Wodehouse, who I see has already been mentioned a few times.

Wondering about Asimov though, even if I long ago stopped reading him and have only read a fraction of his output.

henning mankell

def Roald Dahl for me. Non children's book author would be Vargas Llosa probably. Not my favourite but his highs are good and he has a more rewarding back catalogue than any of the other "boom"ers afaict

Ever read any of his collected stories for adults? I never did, though used to see Tales of the Unexpected, Some One Like You, and others (come to think of it, got an omnibus somewhere). Have watched some adapted for Alfred Hitchcock Presents

I’d love to know more about Harry Mathews. I have an omnibus edition of all his novels but am intimidated. Also have his 20 Lines A Day book and that approachable and enjoyable. He was an Oulipo guy, right?

Yes indeed. At one point the only American member, or the only name one, or something.

yes he was in Oulipo but unlike most of those guys he didn't usually foreground whatever constraints he used...you can just sense there is something weird running in the background and fueling the mood and his choices

if you enjoyed Twenty Lines A Day I wld recommend Singular Pleasures, the collection of masturbation vignettes.

This too:

http://jean-claude-kuner.de/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/manuskript_farce_double_english.pdf

I think a good entry point w/ the novels is My Life In CIA, and maybe backward toward some of the thornier denser stuff, Tlooth and Sinking of the Odradek Stadium

Thanks for the tips, Hadrian. I attempted Tlooth but couldn’t find my way in. My Life in CIA looks more my speed.

Yeah, that, or wikipedia makes this look appealing too:
Mathews's next novel, Cigarettes, marked a change in his work. Less whimsical but no less technically sophisticated than his first three novels, it consists of an interlocking series of narratives revolving around a small group of interconnected characters. The book's approach to narrative is generally realistic, and Cigarettes is ultimately moving in a way that none of his previous books attempted to be.[14]

Cigarettes is terrific

Yup

Updike probably. He churned them out.

probably RL stine lol. i collected tons of them because i liked the covers as a little kid then a couple years later a puritan streak in me made me commit to reading all of them. even at the time i knew they were thin gruel and i remember nothing about them now.

as an adult, probably DFW, in my early 20s