The 5+ Club: On "author completionism" & keeping track of who you read

How do you know when you know an author well?

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The Night Light, Stefan Johansson (1876-1955)

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Once upon a time, Goodreads had a very basic little feature where the authors you had read more than once were ranked in a list with your most-read author at the top (alongside the number of their books you’d read).¹

The top of my list, at the time this feature existed, looked something like this:
Lemony Snicket (8)
Sara Shepard (6)
John Green (5)

When this tool disappeared, having to sort my “read” books by author alphabetically and then count titles myself didn’t scratch that same itch. I wanted competition. A leaderboard. When I was faced with the question of my favorite author, I wanted a definitive, up-to-date answer at the ready—with evidence.²

I might be more of a generalist than specialist, reflected in a natural tendency to want to read widely across authors and genres rather than deeply into the works of a handful of writers. Despite the urge to read one book by an author as grounds to check them off the proverbial list of “Authors To Read,” it’s exciting and challenging and rewarding to know certain authors well, too, and begin developing relationships with their work.

In August, I read Natalie McGlocklin’s Subverse Reads newsletter on becoming an author completionist. She writes about the strange parasocial effect of getting to know an author’s work well, the way their “words and worlds and characters become ingrained into our lives like a shadowy microfiche layered over our own waking moments.”

The Curator: on becoming an author completionist

I especially loved this passage of Natalie’s:

“I find it deeply satisfying that I might be able to write or think or talk with someone (you dear readers) deeply about an individual author - their prose style, the way their writing has changed or deepened over time, how their storylines have matured, how a later book is in conversation with a previous one. It provides a richness of context and understanding that is lost when we hop from author to author.”

And still, despite the benefits and rewards, I think it can feel intimidating to set out on the journey of “completionism.” If an author has written twenty novels, I’d be committing months to their work. What could I be missing out on? What if I’d get more out of the collected works of someone else instead? How would I know? As Natalie so aptly writes, “Every book you choose to read is a choice NOT to read every other book in existence.”

I’ve set “reading goals,” whether numeric, genre-based, monthly, yearly, etc.³ for almost as long as I can remember, and a couple years ago, it felt like an interesting exercise to map out which authors I’d read most and who I wanted to read more of. As an attempted “remedy” to my generalist tendencies and the overwhelm of completionism, I came up with the 5+ Club: Once I’ve read five novels by a writer, I feel that I know them “well” and have established a commitment to reading their work.

The System

I keep track of my most-read authors on a Notion page.

First, every author I’ve read more than once gets added to the page alphabetically. I search their name on fantasticfiction.com to easily copy their list of book-length works, including years, which I paste into a drop-down. I highlight the books I’ve read in green and additional books I already own in yellow. Next to their name, the number of their books I’ve read out of their total count.⁴

If I’m an author completionist (!), I turn their name yellow and add a star emoji. I’ve read 9 authors in their entirety. This is a fun designation, but not a remarkable achievement necessarily, considering two of my “completionist” authors have written three books each (Jessi Jezewska Stevens, Elif Batuman), and the rest have written just two (Kiley Reid, Calla Henkel, & more)—but I’ve established a relationship with these authors in the sense that I’m committed to picking up their next books as soon as they come out.⁵

Most importantly, if I’ve read more than five books by an author, they become members of the 5+ Club.

The 5+ Club

When an author is inducted into the 5+ Club, their name becomes blue. (The number five is arbitrary—chosen maybe because it seems difficult to accidentally read five books by any single writer?)

I like the 5+ Club as an alternative to focusing on author completionism because it feels achievable and motivating. Once I’ve read two or three books by an author, they’re automatically on my radar; the 5+ Club is in sight. Glance at your shelves, scroll through Goodreads, flip through your notes to see whose name appears and keeps appearing; maybe you’d feel satisfied putting together a 3+ Club, or a 10+ Club, or you’ll decide to stick to true “completionism.”

Once an author’s name turns blue in my alphabetical list, I add them to a very basic little leaderboard, á la Goodreads of old:

Ray Bradbury 12 / 50+
Haruki Murakami 7 / 26
Ernest Hemingway 6 / 27
Annie Ernaux 6 / 20
Ann Patchett 6 / 15
Kazuo Ishiguro 6 / 11
Rachel Cusk 5 / 17
N.K. Jemisin 5 / 13
Elena Ferrante 5 / 11
Franz Kafka 5 / 10

A few of the writers closing in: Virginia Woolf, Alejandro Zambra, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Shakespeare (!), Italo Calvino, Yoko Tawada… & more. And here, a few more glimpses at my Notion set-up:

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I am hugely curious about everybody’s systems of reading and tracking authors, and I would love to hear from you in the comments or in an email. Have you read the full works of any favorite authors? Who’s in your 5+ Club? Pros & cons to author completionism?

As always, thanks for reading! I’m planning to have two newsletters go out in December—one of which will be my third annual Year in Reading. Looking forward to sharing :)

If you’re looking for more…

• Some writing on authors’ entire bodies of work: Brandon Taylor reads Émile Zola’s twenty-novel cycle for the LRB, Bailey Trela reads everything by Marilynne Robinson for CRB

• I’ve loved Celine Nguyen’s newsletters revealing the work that goes into the literary criticism she publishes and would recommend personal canon to anyone interested in any variation of literary “behind-the-scenes” writing. Check out Celine’s essays about her essays about Sheila Heti and conspiracy theory novels to start.

1. This must have been over a decade ago, now—I’d love to know whether anybody else remembers this?! The feature was under “tools,” where you can now find “import and export” and “find duplicates.”

2. Disclaimer that I don’t currently believe one’s favorite author is necessarily the author they’ve read the most!

3. Considering writing a future newsletter on reading goals more largely—stay tuned

4. Getting nit-picky, but for authors I read in translation, I include the number of books that appear in English rather than their total count here

5. The author is demoted from completionist status in the period after they’ve published a new book before I’ve read it—and of course I want to keep them on the list!