Today’s Monday Musing prompt from Should Be Reading:
- Are you currently collecting any authors? Why?
- Do you have all of their books? If not, why not?
- Did you buy all the books in the collection at the same time, or did you buy a book here, a book there? Have you actually read all of the collection? If not, why not?
Currently? No.
But I have done, and when I do I like to not only collect the author but also read things like bios and collected letters.
The last author I collected, for instance, was Evelyn Waugh. I read a number of his novels: Decline and Fall, Scoop, Vile Bodies, Handful of Dust, The Loved One, Helene. (I’d already read Brideshead some years earlier.)
Around the same time, I also read Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family by Evelyn’s grandson, Alexander Waugh. I read Bright Young People: The Lost Generation of London’s Jazz Age by D. J. Taylor.
Reading related non-fiction books enriches the reading experience for me, and may even help me become a better writer.
What is your response to the prompt?
that sounds so very…complete!
Yeah, I know — mind you I only go that nutsy once every few years :-)
I agree that if you are going to collect a specific author’s books, then you should read a biography or study up on them to know why they wrote and how they became inspired to write the books you love so much!
Great answer!
Here’s my MM: http://palmtreesbarefeet.wordpress.com/2011/11/14/musing-monday-collecting-by-authors/
It does enrich the reading experience, doesn’t it? Thanks for stopping by Kalie Lyn!
By “collecting authors” I thought you meant agents taking on clients. I almost wish my reading list was empty enough to start scooping up people’s ouvres!
Ha, funny!
I hear you on reading list. And I don’t know why I sometimes get going on an author. But sometimes, something clicks, and I suddenly want to read “everything” he/she wrote.
And Waugh actually taught me as a writer, in several ways. One is more or less directly: before he became a writer, he worked for awhile as a cabinetry apprentice, and he later wrote about constructing novels as if they were cabinets. I love that metaphor: the novel is it’s one self-contained whole, but within it there are various drawers–some large, some small, but all interrelated in some way–all hiding things, but if you open the drawer you make discoveries–and the novel can be dressed up w/ decorative embellishments here and there depending on how pretty you want to make it.