Five by ten?

[flemmings]

That 'five books by ten authors I Have Read' thing is a doddle for anyone who reads mysteries: 

A Conan Doyle
Agatha Christie
Dorothy L Sayers
Gladys Mitchell
Edmund Crispin
Rex Stout
R. Austin Freeman
Dick Francis
Lindsey Davis
Elizabeth Peters

or fantasy:

Ursula Le Guin
Ben Aaronovitch
Neil Gaiman
J.R.R. Tolkien
Andre Norton 
Michael Moorcock
Terry Pratchett 
Tanith Lee
Patricia McKillip
Zen Cho

or children's writers:

Louisa May Alcott
E. Nesbit
C.S. Lewis
Peter Dickinson
Susan Cooper
J. K. Rowling for-my-sins
Joan Aiken
Diana Wynne Jones
L.M. Montgomery
Tove Jansson

But of course, when you get to seeryus littrachure, I think only Jane Austen. Couldn't swear that I've read five Dickens *novels* (do Christmas Carol and Edmund Drood count?),  can't remember if I've read five Hardy, abandoned Proust at the start of The Fugitive (jealousy is the most boring emotion possible), definitely did not finish vol.5 of Dream of Red Chambers if I even started it, and anyway that's as much one volume as Genji.

Comments

[kore]

Christmas Carol totally counts!

I have read at least five Hardy novels but only because I did a grad VicLit seminar. We also read the Dynasts for Godsakes. I still have a copy of it. If the world ever runs out of sedatives, people will be sent to sleep in five minutes flat by the Dynasts.

(Let's see....Under the Greenwood Tree, Far from the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure....MORE than five.)

I have the big gray paperback boxed set of Proust and I read maybe one-fourth of the first volume and really liked it, but it took like weeks and I realized I could be reading a lot of other books in the time it took me to even read the first volume. I think I made it through Combray II, I certainly didn't get as far as Odette. I think.

[flemmings]

I know I read Jude, Tess, Mayor of Casterbridge (gr 12 English) and Madding Crowd. Maybe Return of the Native but after 50 years memory becomes cloudy.

I got through the first three of Proust in English-- the deadly Scott Moncrieff stodge-- because there was no internet then, and Cities of the Plain in French because I was living in France at the time and my roommate told me not to be so damned insular, read it in French. But that was as far as I could go. I have the newer translation but no desire to reread, even in my old age.

[heleninwales]

Like you, I have read multiple books by many genre authors, but apart from Jane Austen, I have read few of the classics and even fewer of the new lit fic writers.

[flemmings]

There's so much 'middle-aged academic/ wife having mid-life crisis' to modern lit fic that I tend to leave it alone. Writers of colour excepted, because they at least have a new-to-me slant on things.