Which authors dominate my bookshelf? I saw this post from Anecdotal Evidence and decided to check out my own bookcases.
The rule is that an author must have five books on the shelf to get a mention on my list. My books are not very ordered, so my list may not be perfectly accurate. It also doesn’t take certain things into account. A large ‘Collected Poems’ only counts as one book, but may contain more poems than five slim volumes.
I started ordering my list by nationality, but that presented immediate difficulties. Where does T.S. Eliot go – the UK or USA? How about Salman Rushdie? Or Charles Simic?
So I’ve just stuck them all together. There were a few surprises. I didn’t realise I had so much J.G.Ballard, Charles Dickens, George Orwell and Carl Hiaasen. I expected poetry to have more representation, but the presence of several Collected Poems and Selected Poems probably explains that, and also I have a wide taste in poetry, rather than restricting myself to a few favourite authors. Here’s the list.
Alasdair Gray
T.S. Eliot
Tim Parks
Graham Greene
Salman Rushdie
J. G. Ballard
George Orwell
Paul Auster
Don Paterson
Douglas Coupland
Paul Theroux
Haruki Murakami
Carl Hiaasen
William Shakespeare
Charles Dickens
Louis de Bernières
Seamus Heaney
Charles Simic
John Gardner
Don DeLillo
Simon Armitage
Primo Levi
James Kelman
Raymond Chandler
Ernest Hemingway
Simone de Beauvoir
Jean-Paul Sartre
Henry James
