He's My Favourite Author, I've Read One of His Books

I recently read an article discussing how odd it is for people to proclaim authors as being brilliant, or among their favourites, when they had read just a tiny amount of their output, usually only one or two novels. I have been doing this myself for years, mostly with writers that I liked while I was at university. For example, I often cite Joseph Heller as being one of my favourite authors, when what I should really say is that Catch-22 is one of my favourite books. Even though Catch-22 absolutely blew me away when I first read it, and has done the same after three re-readings, even though it's easily the funniest novel I've ever read, one of very few to make me genuinely laugh out loud, and on nearly every page too, I have never read anything else by Joseph Heller, and at this point in time I don't intend to. This is one of the funny things about literature: if I hear a brilliant album by a band, there's no way I could leave the rest of their repertoire unheard forever, but I'm perfectly comfortable doing this with Heller, and plenty of other authors whose books I've really enjoyed. I'm not sure exactly why this is. Of course, I've heard that Catch-22 is by far and away Heller's best book, but still, I usually would like to see for myself if his others are any good rather than just accepting this as fact, especially considering how much I love Catch-22. There just seems to be some invisible brain-switch that flips when I get to the end of a novel that tells me, regardless of the quality of that particular book, whether I want to read more by this author or not.

Just recently, I've begun to get into a couple of authors and actually feel the desire to read a number of their books, to immerse myself in their thoughts and feelings and worldviews, and devour their entire publishing history. Haruki Murakami is the best example of this, perhaps even more so because I didn't actually love the first two books of his that I read, they just really made me want to see more of what this intriguing novelist had to say. I kept going and came to The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, which encapsulated everything that I thought could have been amazing about the first two books I'd read but was just slightly missing, and Wind-up Bird was so good it's encouraged me to make my way through his canon until I've taken in every word he's ever printed. At the moment I'm reading 1Q84, his latest work, and with each chapter I feel as if I'm understanding him more as an author and person. I'd love to go back and read the first two books I read by him, because I'm sure now that I'm a devoted fan, I'd like them all the more.

So it's odd: some authors are lost inside their greatest works and you feel no need to go any further, while others produce a body of work that holds together and elevates each individual piece to a level that it cannot reach alone. I'll have to stop thinking of Joseph Heller as one of my favourite authors, and just leave Catch-22 alone on its pedestal as one of my favourite books.