Top Ten Tuesday: Most-Read Authors

“Top Ten Tuesday” is a feature started by “The Broke and the Bookish“, in which people list their top ten books that match some given criterion. It changes every week, and happens on a Tuesday. The previous two sentences should be sufficient to explain the name.

I keep meaning to get involved, as I both like books and can count to ten, but I always forget, only remembering immediately after a topic that I could have done, and directly before a run of subjects that I dislike deeply. This time though, I checked and found a topic that  I can talk about, happening today. I have decided to take the plunge – I won’t manage to write for it every week, but I will occasionally, and I might as well start sometime.

This week’s subject is “Top ten authors I’ve read the most books from”. It appears in a different format in the title of this post because that dangling “from” looked weird, and replacing it with “by” didn’t solve the problem. Still though, I have picked ten authors – I might be missing a few who should be on this list, but the following are all authors who I have read extensively and enjoyed. They are in no particular order.

1. Terry Pratchett

   There are more than forty books set in the Discworld, plus other books and series like the Nome trilogy, or Carpet People. I’m a little behind on the Discworld, but I think I’ve still read the vast majority of his work.

2. Georgette Heyer

   Georgette Heyer wrote Regency romances, and lots of them. She set most of the patterns and tropes in the genre. As far as I’m aware, the only one of hers I haven’t read is The Great Roxhythe, because I’ve never managed to get my hands on a copy.

3. Charlaine Harris

   Charlaine Harris isn’t my favourite author for vampires and romance, but she is a rather prolific one. I own a lot of her books with “dead” somewhere in the title.

4. Jim Butcher

   The Dresden Files plus the Codex Alera adds up to rather a lot.

5. Elizabeth Gaskell

   Mrs. Gaskell wrote books with strong moral messages, such as “adulterous women die alone”, and “you can’t trust men who went to university”. Despite the rather dated outlook though, her books are frequently very sweet, concerned with the enduring power of love.

6. Ian Fleming

   I read the Bond books long before I saw the films, and despite their many problems (sexism, racism, etc.), I still have a lot of affection for them. A few months ago, I found a complete matching set.

7. H. P. Lovecraft

   Lovecraft is my third author with incredibly retrograde social attitudes – the writer of unfathomable cosmic terrors was also terrified of people from Asia. Regardless, he wrote a lot, much of it racist,  and I read it all.

8. Bernard Cornwell

   I really like historical fiction, particularly anything set in or around the Napoleonic Wars. Cornwell’s Sharpe’s… series is a lengthy favourite of mine.

9. Paul Stewart & Chris Riddell

   The Edge Chronicles is a masterpiece – it’s classified, generally, as children’s fiction but there aren’t many adult series that can match it for depth and originality. The only one I haven’t read is the last one, because my copy is in another country.

10. Zane Grey

    I have no idea how many westerns I have read. I think it’s quite a lot, most of them by Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour. I like the purity of the stories, the way it’s all black-and-white. I don’t have anything against complex fiction or shades of grey, but sometimes all I want is an exciting story where the hero gets the girl and the bad guy gets shot.

That’s my list then. It took me longer than I thought to find ten who fitted the topic, and I disqualified some authors who I’ve ended up reading because they were there and I was bored, rather than any particular enjoyment.

The parent post on The Broke and the Bookish is here.