(no subject)

[proximoception]

Next year I'll ditch books and master pinball.

In the meantime this question might be fun: what authors have you read all, or all in their major line, or nearly all of?

I like running through an author, where possible--so this list resembles all my others--though there's been little time for it in recent years. Seems to help one understand a writer better than the best criticism can. Mine:

Possibly only Shakespeare for complete writings. I missed some bits of Wilde--early verse plays, some poems, letters and fairy tales. I think I've read everything translated by Goethe but his non-fictional prose. Probably everything by Kleist that's been translated. Short Finnegans and "Penelope" for Joyce.

Aeschylus, Sophocles, Marlowe, everything translated by Moliere post 1900, Ibsen, Chekhov for plays. All Stoppard and Pinter through the '90s. Probably all but a handful by Beckett, Shaw too. Must have missed three or four by Racine. Read all Valery's and Buchner's but there's few. Everything by Hofmannsthal I could find, likewise Musset & Marivaux. Never finished Congreve's Old Bachelor. All or nearly all of Sheridan.

Only Kafka & McCarthy for fiction (apart from one-shots like Emily Bronte). Borges for non-collaborative fiction. All Tolstoy's but Resurrection, all but three of Roth's books, all but the last two of Crowley's. All Calvino's but Castle of Crossed Destinies, a double handful of stories and whatever hasn't been translated. Haven't read Proust's minor works. Must have read all Hemingway's fiction but that early parody and the posthumous novels. For O'Connor I've missed a handful of short stories and the latter half of Wise Blood. Haven't read Dream Life of Balso Snell. I wonder if I read all of Douglas Adams' novels. Did read all four Salinger books.

Dante, Milton, Blake, Shelley, Byron, Keats, Baudelaire, Rossetti, Rimbaud, Yeats, Housman, Thomas, Frost, Stevens, Eliot, Crane for poems. Also people like Stephen Crane, Dowson, Thomas Gray etc. who wrote so little it shouldn't count. I skipped a few of Spenser's early poems, likewise Beddoes. Probably read 90% of Dickinson by now. Nearly all available Holderlin, Pushkin, Morike. All Carson's verse or verse-ish books. All Lorca but some of Poet in NY. Most everything by Borges that's been translated. Marvell except some dubious satires. Almost all of Wordsworth through 1806. All Owen but his Andersen story. Haven't read Bishop's uncollected poems.

I kept up with Vidal's non-fiction till lately. May have missed a few pages of Bloom here and there. Most everything by Borges that's been translated.

Forgetting things, as always, but I find listing soothing. Sample of yours?

Comments

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

Very quick take: Shakespeare, Homer, Proust, Beckett, Blanchot, Henry James, Milton, Keats, Shelley, Blake, Hammett, Chandler, Bishop, Merrill, Austen, probably others....

[grashupfer.livejournal.com]

This is fun. I've read everything I can get my hands on by Emerson - only about 33% of the journals though. All of Pynchon that I know exists. All of Fitzgerald unless there are some stories I don't know about. Only about half of his collected letters. All of Dickinson's poems collected as of the 1990s. Collected Stevens but who knows what else is out there. A good 80% of Merrill. All of McCarthy except the plays. Working on Keats now.

i'm nothing if not not well-read

[jones-casey.livejournal.com]

beckett, vonnegut, lethem, pavic, salinger, wanted to say toole, but haven't read the neon bible, working on bellow, but a ways to go still.

and wasn't going to go genre, but since you mention him, douglas adams, yes.

[thelican.livejournal.com]

I'm very predictable: Proust and Nabokov. Although there are essays and letters and short fiction that I haven't. In the case of the latter, it began as a pre-grad school sort of private pissing contest and, many years later, found me sick to death of Nabokovian minutiae, and ended up making me wish we (that was the *we* of academia) could just stick to his truly good stuff and not hermeneuticize the trivial details of the stuff that just...isn't.

And, actually, most of Michael Chabon: chronologically, almost. He's the one, actually, whom I've really, really enjoyed seeing develop as a writer - and just as a person.

But, then, Austen - too, I realize as teach P&P. Well, Austen in the conventional sense that most of us have - all the novels, none of the juvenilia or un-finished. And yes, Salinger - went through that phase in my teens. All of Joyce, save the Wake, which doesn't really appeal. Not now. Pretty predictable stuff. More Shakespeare than any other author but Nabokov, but still not by far all of Shakespeare. Almost all Fitzgerald - not The Last Tycoon, though - and not letters. Many, many, many by Stevens - but always new ones surface.

Again, not surprising names. I wouldn't ever read everything by the author of a novel I loved just to say I did. So often, just single novels, single collections of poetry or shorts, or whatever, are marvelous, but there's no clear need (outside of academic pursuits) to read the rest. Because there's just so much else.

[whatever-being.livejournal.com]

Mine are predictable too, and not very numerous. All of Woolf, save Night and Day, and I'll get to that, I'm sure, as the dissertation proceeds. Proust, also. And I think most of Anne Carson. From earlier infatuations, Austen and Wilde. I also attempted to work my way through the entirety of DeLillo's corpus in undergrad, and made it pretty far before I lost interest. What a nice idea this is.

[andalus.livejournal.com]

when i was young i had a conversation with the husband of one of my mother's friends and he told me his theory of reading, that he read around and found someone he liked then read everything they wrote. if the person was alive then he'd have to wait around for them to publish their next book so in the meantime he found someone else to read all of. strange man, his biggest recommendations that i can remember were faulkner and john grisham.

I can't even say Hart Crane since I bet there's stuff in the back of collected I glazed over.