Author You’ve Read The Most Books From?

Philip Roth. 12 books.

I would have to look at my library and count em up but top contenders are surely:
Naguib Mahfouz
Michael Moorcock
R.K. Narayan
Philip K. Dick

kinda comes down to who wrote more lol

probably enid sodding blyton

and as an adult?

Simenon

i like Simenon, but after 3 books i felt i had enough

there are a bunch of other authors I've read in their entirety (Bester, Joyce, Chandler etc.) but they just didn't write as much for one reason or another

xxp

It's probably still Jules Verne.

Oh, who are we trying to kid, it's Chuck Tingle for all of us, right?

second after Roth:
probably Bernhard - 9.

I've probably exceeded 20 on Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, Donald Westlake, and P. G. Wodehouse.

Depends on how many books they wrote doesn't it. For sheer volume probly Ian Fleming or one of the Doctor Who novelizers

Moorcock - 30+
Mahfouz - 20+
Narayan - 12
PKD - 32

Gosh, it might be DFW (all of them, minus the book about infinity which I didn't get all the way through because I'm a dummy). I'm too much of a dilettante to stick it out through large swaths of any given author's bibliography, as much as I'd like to.

Oh, actually it's probably Stephen King. Look, I said I was a dummy.

As an adult...shit it probably IS Pynchon, with four. I know, I know. I'm a terrible reader.

If I count most book-readings, including rereadings, then Tolkien and Austen are up there too.

PKD for sure

I've read all or almost all of Nabokov, Woolf, Joyce, DeLillo, Walker Percy. Also most of Annie Dillard, John McPhee, probably Faulkner, Atwood, Updike, DF Wallace.

Can't think of anybody other than Simon Reynolds who I've read most of in the last several years.

I know I read a load of Beckett when I was in my late teens. Also read several Kerouac, Ballard, Dick, Bukowski, Mark Kurlansky, Oliver Sacks, Terry Pratchett, Michael Moorcock and I think a few others.
But I think more recently I've read more diversely among several authors.

I have a Patricia Highsmith Ripley Omnibus to pick up which I hope I'll get through. Been wanting to read her for ages.

most is def joyce carol oates

next tier is prob roth / updike / delillo

next tier is prob dfw / joan didion / richard powers / cal trillin

then prob like franzen / curtis sittenfeld / jen egan / arthur phillips

Douglas Coupland - 7

lol probably Daniel Pinkwater

ha that's a good one, that guy has *a lot*

Tove Jansson
Russell Hoban
Murakami I guess even though I'm hardly even a fan at this point
Ray Bradbury
He doesn't have that many books but I'm probably in the top percentile of Charles G Finney readers

Like I think Jonathan Lethem and I are the only people who read The Unholy City.

I have a copy! But I'll probably read dr lao again before I get to that one.

My most read author is jack vance.

In terms of sheer quantity, either Westlake, Wodehouse or Simenon

Oh yeah, Bradbury is definitely up there for me.

And Judy Blume.

I've read nearly all of the fiction by these: Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Richard Wright, Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus

For academic purposes: majority of works by Kant, probably half of Sartre (way too much to ever really read everything), and all of Plato (except the Laws which I'm stuck in).

Another vote for Wodehouse, though it's been awhile. Think there may have been one or two, latter day, lesser works, that I read under both US and U.K. titles.

Aargh. Please delete first comma from second sentence.

I think Garcia Marquez or Vargas Llosa for me with 8 or 9 each. It was reading these two extensively that made me less likely to read all of an author's work: there is definite repetition of themes in many authors works and id argue that, for example in Garcia Marquez's case you can read 2 or 3 of his books and miss little of value that you would get from being more of a completist

Westlake is the best for scarfing down a book a day. Thinking about it, I've easily read about 40 of his.

I burnt out badly on Wodehouse.

Philip K Dick - 40+ novels, 2000 pages of the complete short stories, never tackled the Exegesis because life is too short
J.G. Ballard - 20-ish novels, shitload of short stories, lots of essays & reviews
Diana Wynne Jones - 20-ish novels

I'm leaving Enid Blyton out of this

I am pretty sure i have read 70 Agatha Christie books.

Read all available Goosebumps books as a kid, so yes, it's R.L. Stine.

Lawrence Block
Donald Westlake
PKD
Michael Connelly
Stephen King

I've read all of William H Gass and most of JG Ballard and all of Flannery O'Connor's fiction and a silly amount of Stephen King. I'm sure there's someone I'm blanking on from when I was younger & more of a completist.

almost definitely Alasdair Gray.

Probably Beckett.

B.S. Johnson for me.

Probably Wodehouse. Maybe Westlake/Stark. I tore through the first "season" of those Stark books over a couple of years, then added some other Westlakes for good measure. (I've yet to get to the 90s Parkers -- I've been hoping the University of Chicago Press would reprint the last few. Looks like they're coming out in September!)
With time, I expect César Aira and Amélie Nothomb will be up there, just because they (and their translators) keep producing a steady supply of little treats. I wouldn't call either favorites, but I'm always interested in their work.

I've read all or almost all of Nabokov, Woolf, Joyce, DeLillo, Walker Percy.
I'd love to hear what you like best by Percy. I only ever read _Lancelot_, a book I recall enjoying a lot, but that's virtually disappeared in the mire of my memory. Obv _The Moviegoer_ is his most famous. Other than that, I have no idea what to look into of his work.

Besides The Moviegoer you should also read The Last Gentleman.

Lancelot I'm afraid I didn't like very much, he was in full on grumpy old man mode when writing that one, iirc

F. Scott Fitzgerald (everything afaik). Other than that most of Nabokov, Joyce, Proust, De Nerval and Goethe. Semi- or non-novelists prob Walter Benjamin and Barthes. Poetry: Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Rilke, Heaney and Cummings.

Single books I've re-read the most are On the Road and Catcher In The Rye; yet I've not read either in at least 15 years.

Though perhaps the answer really is indeed Blyton! God I read a lot of those when young.

F. Scott Fitzgerald (everything afaik).
Even The Crack-Up?

Yes. I was being completist with Fitzgerald, and while I found it unnerving to read him about his personal issues, it was quite heart-wrenching, too.

(though I've a knack for stuff like that, hence Gérard de Nerval being in my list too, constantly blurring the lines between fiction and the personal (illness) )

Wodehouse's multiple appearances itt is encouraging. I'd wondered if the Jeeves and Wooster series was worth more than a shallow dip.

PGW was extremely consistent, aside from maybe his very last book, the one I was trying to remember the name of before, which is known as The Cat-nappers as well as Aunts something something

Rex stout is a very reliable source of delightful acidic mid century US detective whimsy when Wodehouse gets too cloying. And all the Nero Wolfe novels are sensibly slim too.

That sounded dismissive -- I love RS tbrr

Oystein - James Redd & Blecchs is correct. Moviegoer & Last Gent.

From there, Lost in the Cosmos. And then probably stop. That's enough.

OG PGW title of The Cat-nappers was Aunts Aren't Gentlemen. That one is what Xgau would call a Must To Avoid.

I also liked Percy's essays on language in The Message in the Bottle, but wouldn't call it a must read, and really enjoyed the biography Pilgrim in the Ruins, by Jay Tolson, but again only read it after reading the two essential novels.

There is at least one other biography by Samway, who was a Jesuit friend of his, I think, but I haven't read it.

Perhaps the summary of his life in this review of Tolson's bio will suffice: http://www.nytimes.com/1992/11/15/books/an-inheritance-of-death.html?pagewanted=all

probably franklin w. dixon or carolyn keene

; )

Honest answer is Stephen King and Piers Anthony.

Nerdy lit jerk answer is probably DFW (infinite jest counts as at least 3 books), Lethem, Will Self (fuck you he has his moments), Philip Wylie, Nabokov.

I'd have to add Richmal Crompton: I reads the William books incessantly when I was a kid

Patricia Highsmith and Ross MacDonald. Odd pair now I think of it. Almost exact contemporaries too.

R.A. Lafferty, Harlan Ellison, and Jim Thompson (at least in sheer numbers)

Shoot... forgot PKD

Richmal Crompton and Franz Kafka, maybe.

Kudos to the person for whom BS Johnson is their most-read author...

Think I've read all of Patricia Highsmith bar a couple of late novels. Also Evelyn Waugh, other than his travel books. And I read a shedload of Graham Greene in my 20s. Although the real answer may be Herge.

BSJ is also my most-read author, but then I did start a PhD on the guy, so...

Thanks for the Percy tips, James & Puffy.

forgot Highsmith! Also Elmore Leonard.

Grant Morrison, if that counts. Currently working my way through the Penelope Fitzgerald bibliography as it's quite manageable.

I haven't burnt out on Wodehouse yet - I've deliberately saved a few of the best-regarded ones for some imagined retirement period of the distant future.

I'll always read the new Franzens, St Aubyns, Richard Prices, Michael Connellys, Janet Malcolms...

Iain (M) Banks

Graham Greene

I've been reading for so many decades now that there's no way to answer this question accurately in terms of actual numbers for each author. Many of the authors I've read extensively I no longer go back to and haven't approached for a long time.

For example, I've probably read about 95% of Mark Twain's total output, including his novels, travel books, short stories, autobiography, speeches and those odd duck titled Christian Science (where he tried his hand at that new-fangled muckraking the public seemed to enjoy so much) and 1610, which was suppressed by his estate as too shocking, but mainly consists of fart jokes. But, I've read nothing of his since about 1992.

I've read muckle in John MacPhee's catalog of non-fiction, most of Stephen J. Gould's biology essays, big swathes of Knut Hamsun, Gore Vidal, and Dashiell Hammet. I went through a phase of John LeCarre and one of Walter Mosley. Then there's Shakespeare, Donne, Pound, Yeats and all that crew. Wodehouse is up there in terms of sheer numbers, too. I won't touch on the many Big Canonical Names I've waded around in, just because it sounds too much like bragging, when really it is only a reflection of old age and perseverance.

Without a long, hard session of retrospective rummaging, I know I'm bound to miss more names than I retrieve. And the full list would be queerly uninformative, other than by its eclecticism.

B-b-but...!

really don't know

i have a friend who has read *at least* 80 piers anthony books tho, probably more by now

much as i wish i had a better answer to this, my answer is prob isaac asimov, who i read dozens of books by ages 11-15.

no dishonor there, J.D.

Talk in the twin peaks thread has reminded me that Barth is both an unfashionable author I really like and an author I've read the most books from