Five or More

I recently posted  about the books I've read in GoodReads and the numbers I found for individual authors in my list. Edgar Rice Burroughs was the author I'd read the most of by far. 32 books. The number two author was more than half. 15 books read by Neil Stephenson.  Cryptomonicon was the first which I read in October 2004. I then went on to read his Baroque Cycle and the first one Quicksilver I read in January 2005. After that I went back and read some of his older science fiction novels from the 1990's and also continued over the years to read every book of his as it came out.

After Stephenson the list gets weird and goes back to my early love of Ian Fleming's Jame Bond.  Then a mid life fixation on vampires with Anne Rice. Then it was a more recent and current enjoyment of the crime mystery series of John Sandford and the duo of Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. I just finished another one of their novels last week and I have another Sandford book ready to read in my library ebook hold list. So those two authors will continue to accumulate.

The list goes on and on. Fifty years of reading. Lots of science fiction and best selling thrillers. I should add that my list of books that I've read is at 1,415 and counting. Fortunately I was also counting and logging my books over the years. I originally had a notebook that I wrote down the books I read and dated the month that I finished the book. I was doing that back in the 1970's. Then some time in the 1980's I put the list into a word processing document. I added books to that online document for many years, decades actually. Then eventually I took the entire file and uploaded it to the GoodReads website and kept up my logging books there. That app also allowed me to categorize books and manipulate statistics like making the list of authors based on the number of books by each author in my list.

So here is the list... five or more books by an author from my reading list 1970 to 2020.

Edgar Rice Burroughs – 32

And then...

· Neil Stephenson – 15
· Ian Fleming – 13
· Anne Rice – 13
· Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child – 13
· John Sanford – 13
· Arthur C. Clarke – 11
· James Ellroy – 11
· Paul Auster – 10
· William Gibson – 10
· Robert A. Heinlein – 10
· Stephen King – 10
· Tom Clancy – 9
· Michael Crichton – 9
· Richard Russo – 8
· E. L. Doctorow – 8
· John Banville/Benjamin Black – 8
· Larry McMurtry – 8
· H. G. Wells – 8
· Philip Roth – 8
· James S.A. Corey – 8
· Bernard Cornwell – 8
· J. K. Rowling – 7
· Orson Scott Card – 7
· Bruce Catton – 7
· Tana French – 7
· Louis L’Amour – 7
· Mark Twain – 7
· Margaret Atwood – 6
· Rick Atkinson – 6
· Ray Bradbury – 6
· Joseph Conrad – 6
· Umberto Eco – 6
· Philip Jose Farmer – 6
· Dashiell Hammett – 6
· Frank Herbert – 6
· William Kotzwinkle – 6
· Doris Lessing – 6
· George R.R. Martin – 6
· David Mitchell – 6
· Edgar Allan Poe – 6
· John Le Carre – 6
· Kevin J. Anderson – 6
· Andrzej Sapkowski – 6
· S. M. Stirling – 6
· Jules Verne – 6
· Kurt Vonnegut – 6
· Martha Wells – 6
· Theodore H. White – 6
· Stephen E. Ambrose – 5
· John Burdett – 5
· Octavia E. Butler – 5
· Don DiLillo – 5
· Philip K. Dick – 5
· Charles Dickens – 5
· Nick Hornby – 5
· Elmore Leonard – 5
· James A. Michner – 5
· Yukio Mishima – 5
· Terry Pratchett – 5
· Jim Thompson – 5
· Barbara Tuchman – 5