Open Thread: Authors You’ve Read Most?

Fiction or Nonfiction, Which Writers Have You Spent the Most Time With?

Sometimes you find the only reasonable thing to do with an author is read everything you can by them. Fiction probably lends itself to this impulse more than any other type of literature, but it can work for nonfiction as well. The deciding factor is probably some mix of authorial style and voice, vision, perspective, sense of narrative or adventure or humor or irony or . . .

The DNA of infatuation is hard to map, isn’t it?

P.J. O’Rourke.

Whether fiction or nonfiction, I want to hear which writers you have spent the most time with—along with what keeps bringing you back. Let me tell you a bit about some of mine.

Runners Up

As I was thinking of this question earlier, I scanned my shelves to see who might get the prize. Going all the way back to when Everything Bad Is Good for You came out two decades ago, I’ve read a lot of

Steven Johnson

. I jumped back and picked up his Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software, and I’ve read most since then. I just counted nine, and I’ll probably go back and get the rest eventually. Everything Johnson does is brimming with curiosity, optimism, and insights. I’m as bullish on tech as I am in part because of Johnson;

Virginia Postrel

gets credit for the other half.

In the nineties, I read far more H.L. Mencken than any sane person should, both chrestomathies, various collections, and original titles I found on the rare book market: A Book of Prefaces, Treatise on the Gods, Minority Report, The American Language, and so on. I desperately wanted to write like Mencken, and he was both brutal and brutally funny. But then I lost interest in that version of myself at some point. We never step into the same library twice.

Around the same time, I began a more enduring affair—my lifelong, up-and-down-and-up-again relationship with C.S. Lewis. I started off loving his work, especially the nonfiction (I never read the Narnia books until I was in my thirties). Then I grew disenchanted, then re-enchanted, then dis—

You get the picture. The amazing thing about Lewis’s work, however, is that it’s so broad and diverse, there’s something there for anyone, everyone—including all those various versions of me. As the bookcase attests, I kept (and keep) coming back to him for countless reasons: literary, historical, social, devotional, and more. And his essays are among his greatest output. If you don’t know where to start with Lewis, just pick up a couple essay collections and dip in when the mood strikes. They’re usually stimulating, often fascinating, even humorous. It’s hard to go wrong.

Then there are those authors with the potential to take me that far but who have not done so. Several reasons present themselves. Perhaps:

• I haven’t taken my budding addiction to the logical conclusion yet (watch out, Joan Didion); or

• the authors didn’t leave enough work (Shirley Jackson, I’m looking at you, girl!); or

• the authors simply haven’t given me enough to work with yet—as in, they’ve got more life and hopefully more books in them (call your agent, Eugene Vodolazkin, or I will).

Ah, but then. But then. But then.

P.J., We Hardly Knew Thee

There are a select few authors who not only ran out of runway before takeoff but who undoubtedly had more work waiting in the cargo bay, having already written enough to qualify. For me that late, great, and greatly lamented pilot was P.J. O’Rourke, coincidentally the Cato Institute’s H.L. Mencken Research Fellow.

I’ve read almost everything O’Rourke wrote. There were something like five, six, seven billion humans on the planet when O’Rourke roamed the many Admiral’s Clubs—and battlefields and amusement parks—of Earth. None could hold a candle or Cutty Sark and soda to him. I eventually gave up trying; though I did keep reading.

One of the joys of discovering him during his apex years was finding original work in newspapers and magazines (e.g., Rolling Stone, The Atlantic), then reading those same pieces in books fresh from the publisher along with so, so many pieces I missed. Not to mention the back catalog; I scoured every used bookstore I encountered for his earlier work.

P.J. O’Rourke. Photo by James Kegley.

I’ve read seventeen of what I count to be twenty-three total books by O’Rourke. Naturally, I reread most of them, too, some several times. I purchased multiple copies, gave away copies, and replaced battered paperbacks with fresh hardbacks. (I’ve owned at least five copies of Parliament of Whores over the years.) When my eldest asked me about economics, I answered every question the best I could. And then I bought him a copy of Eat the Rich.

Funny, honest, liberal, humane—a person could do worse than emulate O’Rourke’s example. Sadly, we lost the joyful curmudgeon in 2022, depriving us of—who knows?—maybe half dozen more deposits in the world’s bank of brilliance. Alas.

But now to you.

Your Turn

Who are your literary go-tos? Which authors have you read the most? Fiction, nonfiction, poetry, all of the above. Tell us in the comments, and be sure to share a bit about why you value their work. You never know who might get a chance to love them next because you shared your fascination here!

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