caitlinmoran

Authors I’ve read 5 or more books by

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Last weekend, on Bluesky, there was a meme going around where you listed the authors where you have read five or more of their books. I duly complied, but felt it was also worth a blog post to provide a bit of commentary on top.

The ordering of these is essentially the three authors that came to mind, and then the rest were from my Goodreads profile. Also, when I say ‘read’, this includes books that I have listened to as audiobooks. Indeed, this is primarily how I consume books, but I do try to fit in e-books and paper books where I can.

Terry Pratchett

I have read a lot of Terry Pratchett over the years. As a teenager, I read the Johnny Maxwell trilogy, and then started with the Discworld books in 2017. I’ve now read every core Discworld book (all 41 of them), as well as some of Pratchett’s non-Discworld works like The Carpet People, his Long Earth series with Stephen Baxter, and Truckers, the first book in the Bromeliad Trilogy. I tried to get our nine-year-old into the latter, but they weren’t interested and didn’t get a lot of the references, alas.

John Scalzi

Although I’ve not yet read any of his Old Man’s War series, for which he is best known, I have read a number of John Scalzi books. This includes the Lock In series – well, the two books and the prequel – Starter Villian, The Kaiju Preservation Society and The Android’s Dream. I picked up the majority of Scalzi’s books in a previous Humble Bundle, so they’re there for me to read in due course. I’ll also be picking up his latest novel, When The Moon Hits Your Eye when my next Audible credit is available. It’s once again narrated by Wil Wheaton, who does an excellent job – especially in the newer books.

Scott Meyer

Scott Meyer wrote an inventive fantasy/sci-fi series called Magic 2.0, and I’ve read all of those that have been published so far. If you like Pratchett and Scalzi, then you’ll like this series. I haven’t read any of his other books yet though.

Yahtzee Croshaw

Yahtzee Croshaw made a name for himself doing fast-faced and highly sarcastic video game review videos, in a series called Zero Punctuation which ran until 2023. But he has also had seven books published to date (plus two unpublished works available from his web site) and I’ve read five of them. They are, once again, mainly sci-fi, and include the humour that you would expect.

Roald Dahl

I think I’ve read every Roald Dahl book. More recently we’ve started reading some of them to our nine-year-old, hence why they’re showing up in my Goodreads lists.

Juno Dawson

Last year, I started reading Juno Dawson’s Her Majesty’s Royal Coven series. The first two books are fantastic, and I need to read the prequel soon before the final book, Human Rites, is published this summer. I’ve also read several of Dawson’s non-fiction, including The Gender Games and What’s The T? – I recommend both.

Terry Deary

As a kid, I wasn’t into reading fiction so much, so instead I read a lot of books like Horrible Histories. We’re now reading some of these with our nine-year-old.

Matt Haig

As with Juno Dawson, I’ve mainly read Matt Haig’s non-fiction works, like The Comfort Book and Reasons to Stay Alive. But last year I also read The Midnight Library and it fully deserves all of the accolades it received. Just an excellent novel. I need to read more of Haig’s novels in future.

Adam Kay

I remember seeing Adam Kay when he was performing comedy songs in a double act with Suman Biswas, as The Amateur Transplants. We saw them in Manchester – Christine and I were in the early months of our relationship and still lived apart. Back then, Kay was still a practising doctor with comedy and writing as a side-hustle.

Then he published This Is Going To Hurt which was both hilarious and heartbreaking in equal measure. Since then, he’s written a follow-up, Undoctored, but the reason why he features here is that he’s also written a very good series of science books for kids, starting with Kay’s Anatomy. We’ve read all of them to our nine-year-old.

Caitlin Moran

Another author who is here because I’ve read her non-fiction books. Indeed, How To Be A Woman was the first audiobook that I listed to on my Audible free trial, 12 years ago. I’ve also read her follow-ups, More Than A Woman and What About Men? as well as her collections of previously published columns for The Times newspaper. I would recommend them all, although I scored More Than A Woman highest.

Jay Rayner

I think I’ve read all of Jay Rayner’s books – mostly through the audiobooks which Christine and I listen to in the car. Rayner’s dulcet tones have accompanied us on many a long-distance drive over the years.

Gill Sims

Gill Sims is known for the Why Mummy series, of which I’ve read the first four books. There’s also the Saturday Night Sauvignon Sisterhood, which is a free-standing book that tangentially takes place in the same universe. All the books are very relatable if you’re a parent.

Neil Gaiman

I almost didn’t include Neil Gaiman here because, whilst I had read more than five of his books, I won’t be reading any more. I touched on this last week, but following the allegations that surround him, I can’t bring myself to read any more of his work. And that’s a shame, because Anansi Boys was one of my favourite books of all time.

What does this say about my taste in books?

Firstly, I was surprised that I had read five or more books from as many authors as this. Logging what I read on Goodreads has helped here. But I’m also a little disappointed that the majority of authors are straight white men. Admittedly, some of those straight white men, like Pratchett and Scalzi, are/were good allies, but I need to read more books by women and people of colour.

Also, I definitely have a thing for stories with humour, ideally in the sci-fi and fantasy realms, and most of the books that I read have been published relatively recently. Indeed, as I write this, all the authors bar Pratchett and Dahl are still alive.

Listening to books

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Those who know me well know that I don’t ‘do’ books. I’m never find reading a book – it’s always either a magazine, or, most likely, a phone or computer screen. And I particularly don’t do fiction – what I read tends to be factual, news, or opinion pieces.

However, this does not mean that I completely ignore books. One or two books have come out recently that have intrigued me, but I don’t really have the time to read them. Thankfully, someone came up with the idea of the audiobook; you can listen to someone – usually the author – read the book to you, so you don’t have to.

This may seem lazy but there are times when having your head in a book is impractical – like walking to work, or at the gym. This is why I’m growing to like audiobooks – you can do something else whilst listening (although, in my experience at least, nothing that requires a large amount of concentration).

I’m only on my second audiobook so far, which I’ve downloaded from Audible, Amazon’s audiobook store. The first was ‘How to be a Woman’ by Caitlin Moran (Amazon Link). You may wonder why a heterosexual male like me has any interest in a semi-autobiographical feminist book, but I would call myself a feminist, since anyone who believes that men and women should have the same rights and opportunities can call themselves a feminist, whether they themselves are male or female. Plus, it’s a very good read – or, listen, in my case – and may have you laughing out loud.

Having finished that, I’ve started on ‘God Collar’ by Marcus Brigstocke (Amazon Link), another lefty-liberal book, but this time on religion and atheism in particular. So far I’m only around half an hour into it, but as someone who enjoys Marcus’ stand-up routines I’ve not been disappointed.

Both books are around the same length – about 8 and a half hours – and the first took me exactly a month to listen through. Unfortunately, some days I can only fit in around 20-25 minutes of listening as I walk to and from the railway station, so it’s only when I go to the gym that I get to listen in longer stints, which hasn’t happened as often as it should lately. In fact, Saturday was the first time I’d been to the gym since, um, February. Ooops.

With this in mind, I’m on Audible’s 1 book credit per month package at the moment, whereby you pay a monthly subscription and get one free audiobook included with it. Subsequent books bought in that month cost extra, and that can be a big extra cost – although there’s a sale on, to buy ‘How to be a Woman’ at full price would set you back over £20, as opposed to £7 for the dead-tree actual book and only £3.67 to read on a Kindle. That said, the 1 credit package is £8 per month – cheaper than £20, but still quite a bit of money to pay every month. If I’m able to get through one audiobook a month, and don’t run out of things to read, then I suppose it’s worth it, but it’s not cheap. I’ll see how I go.

Playing back audiobooks from Audible can be done in a couple of ways. Support for Audible’s .aa format has been built into iTunes for a few years now and so audiobooks can be played back on almost all iPods, including those that don’t run on iOS. For those that do run on iOS, you can either use iTunes, and play the audiobooks in the Music app, or you can install the Audible app which runs on the iPhone and iPod Touch (but not the iPad as yet). The app lets you manage audiobooks on the device without having to involve iTunes, and has a few advanced features like stepping back 30 seconds if you get briefly distracted. It doesn’t, however, let you purchase more audiobooks from within the app – presumably because Amazon doesn’t want to give a 30% cut of its sales to Apple.

So, that’s me and audiobooks. If you have any suggestions for other books that I should be listening to, let me know in the comments.