I'm Obsessive

I have a confession to make: I've never read The God Delusion. Or On the Origin of Species. I know: I'm a fraud. Worst . . . atheist evolutionary biologist . . . ever.

The problem is that I'm obsessive: I find an author that I simply love, and then I read them and read them and read them until I've read everything they've ever written. I mean, when you read a novel like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, you want the entire world to be filled up with Douglas Adams' books. You'll read their proverbial laundry list. Or the posthumous leavings on their computer.

Some authors over whom I've obsessed: Douglas Adams, Stephen King, Richard Dawkins, Carl Sagan, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, F. Scott Fitzgerald*, George Orwell, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Simon Winchester. I started Isaac Asimov a few years ago. How's it going? Ask me in 400 books. It's so bad, I actually resent prolific writers. Part of me despairs that there will never be a new Stephen Jay Gould book to read, but part of me is glad that I might now actually catch up.

You'll notice Dawkins was on that list. Unfortunately, it's been about seven years since I finished all of his books, which means I'm now two or three books behind. And all of his were such Douglas-Adamsy profoundly good classics that I really ought to read them again.

One of the reasons I love Homer, Dante, and Cervantes? They had the common decency to save up their life's work into a reasonable number of magnum opi. Similarly Sam Harris and Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Socrates? Genius. Aristotle? Fuck you. Goddamn geniuses like Martin Gardner, E. O. Wilson, and Mark Twain are going to kill me.

I'm similarly obsessive about music. Those bands who's songs make you feel like they were written for you, and you don't want to risk the chance that there's something out there just as good that you're missing out on. Artists I've obsessioned: The Beatles, Ani DiFranco, Cake, Ben Folds, Barenaked Ladies, Grateful Dead**, Nick Drake

Somebody help me.

*I don't even like Fitzgerald. This brings up a second category of author: Those who are interesting and/or culturally or historically relevant. The likelihood that they'll get read varies inversely to the size of their canon. Fitzgerald fortunately only had a few novels and some short stories.

**OK, I'm obviously a liar about having everything the Grateful Dead have ever done--that'd be like collecting all of the water in the ocean. But I have at least reached the point where even Dick Dick's Picks would concede I'm at saturation. I mean, how many concert versions of "Sugar Magnolia" can you discriminate?