I’m a binge reader. Not that I read every minute of the day or that I’d read any indiscriminate thing. No, I find an author I like and then read the living daylights out of him or her (or them).

There are better ways and worse ways to go about this process. First of all is the selection process. Between binges, I meander through different authors. Some I’ve heard of, most I haven’t. One cool way to find a new author is to go to Amazon.com, search for a book you like, and note the “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” selections or the “Look for Similar Items” links.

Here, try it yourself: Mysteries and Thrillers

I sample a book from one author and then from another author until – and it doesn’t take long – I find a ripping good author on whom to binge.

Next I research this author’s body of work. How many titles have they written, and in what order they should be read? If the author has developed recurring characters, the books are probably written in chronological order. DO NOT BELIEVE THEM if they say you could read them out of order. When it’s a choice, get the bigger picture from start to finish. You may also witness an author’s talent mature.

Or decline. This is another rule of mine. Maybe the sampler book that sold you on this author was a fluke. Maybe the author starts slumming it and the writing gets progressively worse. This happened – in my opinion – to Preston and Child. They wrote excellent thrillers and had recurring characters that crossed over to each other’s stories. But they got so into formula writing that their latest two, “Wheel of Darkness” and “Cemetery Dance,” were 1) bad and 2) worse. Lucky for me they were their latest novels, so my binge managed to consume all their earlier, better work.

Access to all the books is your next concern. Between the local library, local used book stores and thrift shops, and on line used book stores, I can usually find every book I want.

You may decide on a mini-binge. That is, not read the author’s entire body of work (Isaac Asimov wrote over 500 books), but read a defined series within that body. I recommend Stephen King’s “Dark Tower” series of seven books or Stephen R. Donaldson’s ten book (8 have been published so far) Chronicles of Thomas Covenant.

You may want to try a tangent-binge, such as the “Rama” series by Arthur C. Clarke and Gentry Lee. The early books are brilliant, but once Clarke dropped out, Lee produced inferior sequels that veered way off the quality path, in my opinion.

Here’s a challenge: a maxi-tangent-binge of the entire series of publications connected to Asimov’s “Foundation” series. Asimov wrote 15 novels and dozens of short stories in this series, and scores of other writers wrote sanctioned and unsanctioned novels and short stories, totaling more than 90 separate works spanning more than 20,000 years of story line. Whew!

Six-Eye Jackson

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