Tuesday Top Ten Authors

I have no idea who started this or I’d give credit where credit is due… all I can say for sure is that it wasn’t me. :)

 

My list doesn’t have very high numbers because I haven’t been keeping track of what I’ve read for long. I joined Goodreads less than two years ago, and that was the first time I buckled down and faithfully kept track of what I read and when I read it. However, I do have an Access database that goes back a teensy bit further. I wasn’t recording dates at first, so I don’t know exactly how far it goes back, but I guess it has the last five or six years’ worth of reading history in it.

 

Another reason my list looks weird is because I’ve read many different authors over the past few years. My database says I’ve read 254 books by 169 different authors. So combine the relatively short time period with the author variety, and you end up with a very odd looking "top ten" list.  However, most of these authors actually are authors I like quite a bit.  Most of them gained higher numbers because I liked their books well enough to read at least one entire series by them.

 

Anyway, here’s my list:

 

Robin Hobb – 9 books. One of my favorite authors. I’ve read the Farseer Trilogy, the Liveship Traders trilogy, and the Tawny Man trilogy. When the last book in her newest trilogy is published, I plan to go back and re-read all of these books, plus the other related books that I haven’t read yet.

Assassin's Apprentice

 

David Drake – 8 books. Six of these are because of the Belisarius series that the author co-wrote with Eric Flint. I started the first book in this series with the expectation that I would hate it, but I was so glad I tried it anyway because I loved it.  I also read a couple other standalone books that the author wrote on his own, but wasn’t as crazy about those.

An Oblique Approach

 

Eric Flint – 7 books. Same as David Drake – six of these are because of the Belisarius series. The 7th was Mother of Demons, a standalone novel that I also liked quite a bit.

Mother of Demons

 

Robert Burton Robinson – 5 books. I seriously didn’t even know who this author was when he showed up on my list. Several years back, I read all four books in his “Greg Tenorly Suspense Series”. I thought they were all pretty average, so I’m really not sure why I read the whole series. I had gotten all of them as free e-books so I guess I just kept reading. More recently, I read a cozy mystery he wrote called Sweet Ginger Poison. I really didn’t like that one much at all.  So, unless I lose my mind again, this author's number isn't likely to increase.

 

Brandon Sanderson – 4 books. This should really only count as 3 because one of them (Firstborn) was a very short story. The other 3 were from the original Mistborn series. I really like his writing, so this count is bound to increase before very long.

Mistborn

 

Greg Keyes – 4 books. This was from the fairly-recently-read “Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone” series which I really enjoyed.

The Briar King

 

Daniel Abraham – 4 books. These were all books from the “Long Price Quartet”. I loved that series and want to read more by him in the near future. I’ve been anxiously waiting for him to finish his “The Dagger and the Coin” series.

A Shadow in Summer

 

Peter Watts – 4 books. These were all from the Rifters series. (I reviewed Malestrom and B-Max as separate books although I believe they were originally considered a single book.)

Starfish

 

Stephen King – 4 books. This includes the recently-read The Shining and Doctor Sleep, plus a few years ago I read UR and Misery. This probably only counts as 3.25 since I remember UR as being pretty short.

The Shining

 

Robert Jordan – 4 books. These were the first four Wheel of Time books. I really liked them but I picked a bad time to read them. I was traveling almost every week for 9 months straight on business, plus taking classes on top of that. There were many days when I couldn’t manage more than 5 minutes of reading, at the end of the night when I could barely keep my eyes open. This is not a series you can keep straight in your head without devoting some time and energy to it, so I finally gave up and decided to wait until I had less going on. I eventually want to restart the series and read it through to the end, I'm just nervous about getting bogged down again because my schedule is a little unpredictable.

The Eye of the World