The Minutiae: Completing a Body of Work, Part II
Which authors make it onto my list?
Welcome back to The Minutiae! This is a twice-monthly newsletter for paid subscribers, usually dedicated to whatever book-related topic is currently on my mind.
It’s been a few weeks but I’m finally back with the second half of my list of authors whose work I like so much I’d like to read all of it. In the first part we covered a lot of authors that I’ve made good headway with, but now we are looking at authors who I’ve read fewer books by but nonetheless intrigue me enough to make The List, including debuts.
I’ve been wanting to write a newsletter for weeks but have found it kept getting pushed back (I knew I said it’d be twice-monthly for a reason…) as I was focussed on other things, namely videos which take up a lot of time. I really wanted to do a weekly blow-by-blow reaction to episodes of Severance here in the public section of the newsletter but am now of course five weeks behind… shall I still do this anyway!? Possibly in a separate post at this point. I just love thinking about that show so damn much (and many of the things I like about it—good writing, good storytelling—has a lot of overlap with what I like in my books).
Before we get into the list I wanted to go into a bit more detail about why I find the process of ‘completionism’ so satisfying. As I said in the last post, it’s something that I’ve always done really—someone I could have included on the last list was Philip Pullman, whose every last book I fervently tracked down aged about nine after reading and loving His Dark Materials—but I wanted to actually sit and unpick this impulse a bit more.
It gives you some sort of focus. My reading is more structured than it used to be, but I’ve always liked the focussing power of reading an author’s body of work. I think most avid readers would be able to point to a time when their reading was just pinging all over the place and not landing on anything particularly spectacular. Picking up more books by an author you already love can at least give some sort of through-line to your reading life.
Not to mention, it ups the quality of your reading significantly. This may seem obvious, but the chances of finding an excellent book are way higher with an author whose work you already know and love, and sometimes we need that reminder to lay off the new releases. And even if you don’t like it, you might be able to put it into conversation with their other work, which can be a satisfying endeavour in and of itself.
It gives you a sense of what a ‘mature’ voice sounds like, and can make finding themes and points of comparison easier. Fundamentally, it has made me a better reader. Read one of William Maxwell’s first novels They Came Like Swallows and his last, So Long, See You Tomorrow (both of which cover the life of a young boy who loses his mother to the flu pandemic of the early twentieth century), and you will quite clearly see the differences that make the later novel more successful—changes in point of view, targeted use of particular repeated imagery, a better grasp of narrative tension. Read Toni Morrison’s oeuvre and you will find the ways she explores similar themes in entirely different voices and modes. This is easily one of the most valuable things about reading a body of work.