authors that you have read everything they have written
 

they could be your faves or someone that you were just into at one point in time.

let's make this more reasonable and say virtually everything they have written because i don't want technicalties called on some obscure early work or short story piece.

here is my list, some of it i am proud of, some of it i am not, but i have went through different phases of what i have enjoyed so here goes......and the follow up question, would you read anything new "your" authors put out today if they are still writing?
Craig Clevenger
Bret Easton Ellis
Chuck Palahniuk
Jack Kerouac
David Sedaris
Augusten Burroughs
James Frey
Nick McDonnell
Jay McInerney
Ben Mezrich
David Eggers

that is all i can think of for now. J.

Re: authors that you have read everything they have written
 

J.D. Salinger.. I think I've read most of what he's published, but that's because he doesn't write anything. the stories I've read:

catcher in the rye
franny
zooey
raise high the roofbeam, carpenters
seymour: an introduction
nine stories

and some story that was published in a magazine about a guy who lives above a girl and listens to music with her. don't remember that one too well, I read it like three years ago.

Re: authors that you have read everything they have written
 

i should have added salinger to the list although i think i am missing seymour and the story in the mag.

he is a great author whose total work is easy and enjoyable to cover. cool cool J.

Re: authors that you have read everything they have written
 

Salinger is in my list (I think I also read the short-story but can't remember for sure).

Most of Hemingway
Somerset Maughm (the Razor's Edge, Of Human Bondage)
David Sklansky


When I was a kid I read almost all of the Hardy Boys books as well as the Choose Your Own Adventure series.

Re: authors that you have read everything they have written
 

Somerset Maughm is really good, I read an incredible collection of short stories by him. He had this one... it was about a women who was a famous novelist (famous for her use of the semi colon, in a comedic sense) and her husband, who was a dull person (nick named the philiatrist).

It was really, really good.

Re: authors that you have read everything they have written
 

Neal Stephenson
Vernor Vinge
Ed Miller
Jorge Luis Borges
Oscar Wilde

Re: authors that you have read everything they have written
 

Cormac McCarthy is one of the few for me.

Re: authors that you have read everything they have written
 

what a great author McCarthy is........

i haven't read his new one, but count The Border Trilogy as some of my favorite reading ever.

i was so disappointed in the Horses movie........

good add! J.

Re: authors that you have read everything they have written
 

Cormac McCarthy is one of my favorites as well. His latest novel though is not up to the standard of Blood Meridian or Suttree. Someone made the comment on the Cormac McCarthy forum that he is no longer in the business of writing masterpieces. Perhaps a bit harsh but hard to argue with.

A new play of his was recently performed in Chicago. The audience's reaction was largely favorable. He has another book coming out in a couple of months, this one science fiction. Apparently it's the story of two travellers, one young one old, after some sort of cataclysm.

raisins

Re: authors that you have read everything they have written
 

[ QUOTE ]
Chuck Palahniuk

[/ QUOTE ]

No offense, but I will now assume that I can safely avoid the other authors on your list.

Re: authors that you have read everything they have written
 

Isaac Asimov (fiction only)
Neal Stephenson
Andrew Vachs
Elmore Leonard
James W Hall
Carl Hiaasan
Jimmy Buffett
Tom Clancy
Robert J. Sawyer
Laurence Shames
James Joyce (I think)
Joeseph Conrad

more, I'm sure...

Re: authors that you have read everything they have written
 

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Chuck Palahniuk

[/ QUOTE ]

No offense, but I will now assume that I can safely avoid the other authors on your list.

[/ QUOTE ]

Book snobs are worse than music snobs

Re: authors that you have read everything they have written
 

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Chuck Palahniuk

[/ QUOTE ]

No offense, but I will now assume that I can safely avoid the other authors on your list.

[/ QUOTE ]

Book snobs are worse than music snobs

[/ QUOTE ]

I'm not a book snob. Palahniuk is just flat out terrible.

Re: authors that you have read everything they have written
 

Caleb Carr
E.L.Doctorow
Tom Wolfe
Ayn Rand
William Gibson
Neal Stephenson
Charles Palliser
Clive Barker
Jim Thompson
Harper Lee (sorry, couldn't resist)

Re: authors that you have read everything they have written
 

Some of the authors I have read eveything of:

Patrick White
John Le Carre
E. L. Doctorow
Henry Miller
Norman Mailer
Gore Vidal
Peter Carey
Robertson Davies
Thomas Pyncheon
Paul Theroux
Anthony Burgess
Umberto Eco
Italo Calvino
Jorge Luis Borges
Carl Jung
Jean-Paul Sartre
Jacques Lacan
Peter Matthiesen
John Fowles
Susan Sontag

and others ... those were the first to come to mind.

Re: authors that you have read everything they have written
 

From 6-9th grade im ashamed to admit, I read a fuckton of Dean Koontz books, and I figured out that I had read every book he had every published as of 2000.

I wish I would have picked a good author or something haha sheesh.

Re: authors that you have read everything they have written
 

Geoffrey Chaucer
the Pearl-Poet

Re: authors that you have read everything they have written
 

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Chuck Palahniuk

[/ QUOTE ]

No offense, but I will now assume that I can safely avoid the other authors on your list.

[/ QUOTE ]

Book snobs are worse than music snobs

[/ QUOTE ]

I'm not a book snob. Palahniuk is just flat out terrible.

[/ QUOTE ]

Dude...you have NO CLUE. Bet you can name the author of the Encyclopedia Brown series.

Re: authors that you have read everything they have written
 

vladimir nabokov
thomas pynchon
william shakespeare
kurt vonnegut
bertrand russell

Re: authors that you have read everything they have written
 

[ QUOTE ]
Isaac Asimov (fiction only)

[/ QUOTE ]

I shied away from saying Asimov because I'm pretty sure I missed a short story somewhere or other, but I've read a whole lot of his books. Not any of his nonfiction, though.

20 years ago I could honestly say Stephen King, but he just kept on writing, and I stopped liking what I was reading.

~D

Re: authors that you have read everything they have written
 

[ QUOTE ]
James Joyce (I think)

[/ QUOTE ]

Stephen Hero?

Re: authors that you have read everything they have written
 

Probably no one although close on Gilbert Sorrentino, Ezra Pound, Blake, Emily Dickinson, and Shakespeare. I'm omitting those who have published only a couple volumes of poetry so far.

Re: authors that you have read everything they have written
 

Lee, Harper. “Love—In Other Words.” Vogue 137 (April 15, 1961) pp. 64-65.
Lee, Harper. "When Children Discover America." McCall's 92 (August, 1965) pp. 76-79.
Lee, Harper. “Romance and High Adventure.” in Clearings in the Thicket: An Alabama Humanities Reader, Jerry Elijah Brown, editor. (Macon, Georgia.: Mercer University Press, 2006) pp. 13-20

And Wiki also lists "Christmas to Me" published in McCall's. [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

Re: authors that you have read everything they have written
 

You've read everything by Lacan! Are ya crazy? [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

BTW, you may really enjoy John Irwin's book on Borges and Poe. This, along with his American Hieroglyphics : The Symbol of the Egyptian Hieroglyphics in the American Renaissance, are two of my favorite critical works on American writers.

Re: authors that you have read everything they have written
 

[ QUOTE ]
You've read everything by Lacan! Are ya crazy?

[/ QUOTE ]

Close! [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

Re: authors that you have read everything they have written
 

[ QUOTE ]
Probably no one although close on Gilbert Sorrentino, Ezra Pound , Blake, Emily Dickinson, and Shakespeare. I'm omitting those who have published only a couple volumes of poetry so far.

[/ QUOTE ]

I found this terribly difficult to believe. If it is so, I need to lock my drawers.

Re: authors that you have read everything they have written
 

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
James Joyce (I think)

[/ QUOTE ]

Stephen Hero?

[/ QUOTE ]

okay, you got me...and I seriously doubt I've read EVERY Asimov novel/short story...but god knows I've tried.

Re: authors that you have read everything they have written
 

the major works of dostoevsky do not dissapoint

crime and punishment
brothers karamazov
the idiot
demons (aka the possessed)
notes from underground
the gambler

i have also read the obscure "house of the dead."

i don't plan on completing his works, but i may read some more short stories.

Re: authors that you have read everything they have written
 

I haven't bothered with many of the Greek translations, but I've got through much of the poetry, most of the criticism, transcripts of the broadcasts, along with a good deal of the correspondance.


[ QUOTE ]
If it is so, I need to lock my drawers

[/ QUOTE ]

I'm assuming you've got a few letters or some copies of Blast. [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

Re: authors that you have read everything they have written
 

like i said, not proud of all of them, lol.

many of the other authors are good and very very different from mr. fight club. i am a big reader and tore through almost all of his stuff after the movie. some of it (choke and survivor) was alright. i gave him one more chance w/ haunted. i am done............if you want recommendations though i can do that.

nice comment, i was waiting for it actually. [img]/images/graemlins/smirk.gif[/img]

J.

Re: authors that you have read everything they have written
 

cool list Dom.

can you pick one author out of the list for me, if i was to read all of their work? thanks. J.

Re: authors that you have read everything they have written
 

MidGe---you rule.

Re: authors that you have read everything they have written
 

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Chuck Palahniuk

[/ QUOTE ]

No offense, but I will now assume that I can safely avoid the other authors on your list.

[/ QUOTE ]

Book snobs are worse than music snobs

[/ QUOTE ]

I'm not a book snob. Palahniuk is just flat out terrible.

[/ QUOTE ]

Dude...you have NO CLUE. Bet you can name the author of the Encyclopedia Brown series.

[/ QUOTE ]

Talk about book snobs.

I started writing a post to defend my position on the suckitude of Upchuck Palahniuk, but then I remembered somebody already had:

Lisa Miller, Salon.com

Imagine some crappy novels. Imagine that they're all written in the same phony, repetitive, bombastic style as this paragraph, all hopped-up imperatives and posturing one-liners. Imagine that they're sloppily put together. Imagine that everything even remotely clever in them has been done before and better by someone else. Imagine that each one flaunts the kind of "research" that can be achieved by leafing through a trade magazine for 30 minutes and is riddled with grating errors. Imagine that these books traffic in the half-baked nihilism of a stoned high school student who has just discovered Nietzsche and Nine-Inch Nails. Does it hurt yet? Now, imagine that every five pages or so the author of these novels will describe something as smelling like [censored] or piss because the TRUTH is [censored] ugly, man. Imagine that he affects to attack the shallow, simplistic, dehumanizing culture of commodity capitalism by writing shallow, simplistic, dehumanized fiction.

But, heck, why go to all the effort of imagining any of this when a new Chuck Palahniuk novel arrives at your local bookstore annually?

The latest is "Diary," the story of Misty Marie Wilmot, who works as a waitress on a tourist-plagued island off the New England coast. Peter, her building-contractor husband, lies in a coma after a suicide attempt. Early on, it's fairly obvious that Misty's 13-year-old daughter and mother-in-law are colluding with the rest of the island's old-family residents in a homicidal plot to drive the tourists away by forcing Misty to become a painter. Misty, however, remains clueless about this despite everyone's egregiously suspicious, "Rosemary's Baby"-style behavior and despite the fact that shortly before Peter shut himself up in the garage with the car motor running, he went around scrawling graffiti about the plot in the houses of his clients, then walling off the vandalized rooms to make it look as if they'd never existed. (By the way, the car now smells like urine.)

If this sounds like an incoherent mess, it is. The gimmick of "Diary" is that it's supposed to be a journal Misty is writing for Peter should he ever emerge from his coma. Employing that kind of ventriloquism in a suspense novel would be a tricky thing to pull off for even an accomplished and careful writer, and since Palahniuk is neither, he makes a real hash of it. The narrative wobbles between an unlikely but probably easy-to-write third-person, an aggrieved second-person addressed to Peter, and another second-person narrative addressed, bafflingly, to Misty herself. Eventually, when Misty is kept imprisoned and blindfolded by the townsfolk, it's not clear who's writing it. In any event, at no point does the novel resemble a diary, nor does it sound or feel like the voice or thoughts of an overworked, grief-stricken single mother. Alice never lived here.

A great novelist excels on the small scale and the large, the individual leaf and root as well as the forest; good fiction convinces us that the imaginary is real by selecting exactly the right detail and rendering it perfectly. Reading Palahniuk is a revelation of sorts because it shows that bad fiction works exactly the same way: It's execrable on a sentence-by-sentence basis as well as in overall form and theme. The bad writer, it turns out, picks exactly the wrong detail, flubs it, and then tosses it like a stink bomb in the path of the reader dutifully struggling to follow him. This is a signature Palahniuk technique. In "Diary" there's everything from a glass of "bright orange" wine (when was the last time you saw wine the color of Tang?) to summer homeowners whose initial failure to notice that one of their rooms is missing is shrugged off as a result of too much familiarity -- "After you live anywhere long enough ... it just seems too small" -- even though a paragraph later it says they inhabit these houses only "two weeks each year."

In a typically calculating bit of Palahniukian grotesquerie, we are told that in Peter's "kind of coma ... all the muscles contract ... they shrink and pull your head back until it's almost touching your ass," and, who knows, perhaps this really does happen -- though you'd think the also-shrinking abdominal muscles (not to mention the spine) would prevent such contortions. But as for the bit where the comatose person's "fingers curl under with the fingernails cutting the inside of each wrist," well, gentle reader, I invite you to try that one right now. Perhaps if you're an exceptionally limber concert pianist you might manage to press your nails against the "inside of each wrist," but not by curling your fingers.

But wait, there's more.

In the realm of social observation, ostensibly Palahniuk's forte, we have the "rich strangers" who flock to the island, with their diamonds and "shiny sports cars," demanding "the power seat" in the restaurant where Misty works, tofu instead of veal, and "chelated silver or carob sprinkles or soy-based anything" in their coffee. That might describe a known demographic, but certainly not one whose females wear "so much black eyeliner they could be wearing glasses," "dark brown lip liner," and "long, hooked fingernails" or whose males spray "black flock" on their bald spots, as Palahniuk would also have it. Nor do rich people make a habit of frequenting billboard-studded beaches where "floating in every wave, you see cigarette butts" and there are "sticky used condoms in the sand," let alone "syringes washed up on the beach." (The latter is a nasty side effect of urban waste-disposal problems, not tourism, anyway.)

Blunders like those are rife in Palahniuk's books and more or less glaring, depending on your areas of expertise. A few examples: In "Invisible Monsters," which is about a disfigured model on a crime spree, he's got a "top-drawer party girl" wearing a "Bob Mackie knockoff" of astronomical price. (Knockoffs aren't expensive -- that's the whole point of them -- and no fashionable woman would be caught dead in a Bob Mackie In "Lullaby" he thinks Athena is the Greek god of love (in "Diary" he thinks it's Apollo), and he writes that "experts in ancient Greek culture" believe that "when ancient Greeks had a thought, it occurred to them as a god or goddess giving an order," when in fact this is a fringe theory advanced by Princeton psychology professor Julian Jaynes. Realtors, Wiccans and antique furniture dealers can probably find even more.

Palahniuk maintains his commitment to the slipshod at the level of plot as well. In "Diary," Misty befriends Angel Delaporte, a client of Peter's, who is intrigued by the rage-filled invectives he finds written all over his walled-off kitchen. Angel helps Misty track down and analyze other samples of Peter's pre-coma handiwork. Later in the book, it's revealed that Peter was Angel's lover and planned to flee the island with him on the very night of Peter's "suicide" -- now unveiled as an attempted murder by the island's conspirators. But if Angel was Peter's friend and not one of the hated "summer people," then why did Peter paint Angel's kitchen with curses and wall it off?

Spotting gaffes big and small can be a minor diversion -- a sport of sorts, like bird watching -- while you are slogging through the wastelands of Palahniuk's fiction (surprisingly vast feeling, given the books' actual page length). There's not a lot else to relieve the monotony, especially when the author indulges his penchant for repetition. Reading this is like being cornered by a dimwitted and semi-belligerent drunk possessed by an idée fixe he keeps reciting over and over again, jabbing your shoulder each time. Several dozen paragraphs in "Diary" begin with "Just for the record ..." for no detectable reason. The joke of bitterly reporting Misty's mood as if it were the weather gets pounded into the ground, as does treating the trials of her miserable life as cues in a drinking game. Several references to everyone being in a "personal coma." Many things smelling like [censored] and piss. Countless anecdotes about suffering artists ... Hey, wait, there's another blooper over there!: Lord Byron didn't fast and purge for his art; he was always fighting his own unfashionably un-Byronic chubbiness. How fitting to run into the old poseur in this neck of the woods.

The emotional range of "Diary" is similarly stunted. Misty isn't the only Palahniuk hero who doesn't sound like whoever she's supposed to be. This problem is endemic to his novels: Everyone in them sounds like Chuck Palahniuk. They have one of two moods: gleeful, sloganeering wrath and sullen self-pity. Not surprisingly, this makes his work very appealing to teenagers and the sort of young man whose disaffection springs from hazy origins. (In Palahniuk's best-known novel, "Fight Club," guys oppressed by desk jobs and the availability of inexpensive and stylish yet flimsy Swedish furniture can find relief only in beating each other up. That's "up," not "off," though you gotta wonder. Anyway, the more or less veiled homoeroticism in Palahniuk's fiction is in turn just a veil for narcissism.) As with SUV commercials, the target audience seems painfully clear: It's that strangely oversize fellow you sometimes get seated next to on airplanes or in bars, the one who loudly testifies to "laughing my ass off" all the way through Palahniuk's "[censored] twisted" books and then glares, as if daring you to deny that such a thing is possible or that he is one dark and edgy dude.

The object of all this anger is, vaguely, the overall shoddiness, greed and hypocrisy of contemporary life. It is the culture that promises Misty a "special safe place where she'll live, love and be cared for, forever." (Would that be the same culture that gave "American Beauty" an Academy Award?) Misty's fury at being betrayed in this is the wail of a disappointed child, disgust at a world that turns out not to be all about "Flowers and Christmas lights ... what we're programmed to love." And so, according to the pendulum extremism of adolescence, life must instead be a lie, a fraud, a joke, [censored] and piss. The excessiveness of this attitude makes Palahniuk's ever expanding popularity less dispiriting. His fans may yet grow out of his cartoonish fiction and into a better remedy for debased consumerism: art about the complexity and paradoxes of human beings and their fate. Until then, a hair of the dog that bit them will have to do.

Re: authors that you have read everything they have written
 

Never read his books, but after that review, I can never imagine wanting to. Of course, I had never read George Eliot until a couple years ago, but I then had to wonder why I had waited so long.

Re: authors that you have read everything they have written
 

[ QUOTE ]
Elmore Leonard
Carl Hiaasan


[/ QUOTE ]

I'd recommend Pete Hautman. Start with Drawing Dead. He reminds me of both Hiaasen and Leonard.

Re: authors that you have read everything they have written
 

Raymond Chandler
Dashiell Hammett
Elmore Leonard

Re: authors that you have read everything they have written
 

R.A. Salvatore
Joel Rosenberg
Tom Clancy (although not all the spin-off stuff as most of it that I have skimmed was pretty bad)
W.E.B. Griffin

Re: authors that you have read everything they have written
 

[ QUOTE ]
Never read his books, but after that review, I can never imagine wanting to.

[/ QUOTE ]


You should imagine thinking otherwise, as the reviewer (along with the person who posted said review) is about as far away from The Point as one would fear.

I don't have a problem with people who don't like something and just say, hey, it's not for me. But trying to justify it by blaming the work rather than your inability to comprehend it (or your personal bias that won't allow you to enjoy it) is contemptible -- and Lisa Miller might as well have wielded a flag that read: "Agenda Ahoy!"

Re: authors that you have read everything they have written
 

I kind of agreed with the reviewer on Pahalaniuk. I only read Survivor, and while it certainly didn't suck on a new level of suckiness, it didn't make me want to read any more of his books. I don't "get" Pahalaniuk in the same way that I don't "get" Vonnegut. There's plenty of other authors for me to read. The review itself, though, is childish. It's fun to act superior and tear down what others find enjoyable.

Authors I've read everything by:

Douglas Adams
George Orwell (missing a few essays, read all the novels)
Umberto Eco (I think I am one book behind)
Hunter S Thompson (haven't read the recent diaries/letters compilations)

Re: authors that you have read everything they have written
 

Robert Caro
Tom Wolfe
Jonathan Franzen (that I could find, I'm sure there are some short stories/nonfiction I have missed)