Top Ten Tuesday: Authors Whose Books I Hoard

Top Ten Tuesday is a bookish meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish.

This was pretty easy: all I had to do was go and peruse my bookshelves. The bookshelves don't lie! Here are the authors whose books I collect/hoard the most! There's a fine line between collecting and hoarding, and sometimes I cross it. Case in point: there are authors and books that I love so much that I own multiple copies. Certain books (Madame Bovary, Jane Eyre, Moby Dick) I own in several editions (pointlessly, I guess, but really, can you every have too many copies of Madame Bovary?).

Here, in order of adoration, are the top ten authors whose books I hoard:

1. Anthony Trollope. It is somewhat appropriate that I own so many books by this highly prolific writer.

2. Anton Chekhov. Every single time I go into a used bookstore, I look to see if there is some obscure edition of a Chekhov collection that I don't already own.

3. Charles Dickens. Dickens wrote so many wonderful books--Our Mutual Friend is my favorite, but I also love Bleak House, David Copperfield, and Great Expectations.

4. Alice Munro. There is not another short story writer whose work is so reliably compelling.

5. William Shakespeare. Between the plays and the sonnets (again, several editions), I could fill a couple of shelves with Will's work.

6. Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Admittedly, I haven't read them all....but my two favorite books by Dostoyevsky are The Idiot and Crime and Punishment. And when I'm ready to work on my Classics Club list, I've got a whole shelf of Dostoyevsky books to read.

7. James Baldwin. Brilliant and incisive: there is no one else like him.

8. Marcel Proust. My most unread collection of books! Yes, one of these days I will read all seven volumes of Remembrance of Things Past.... In the meantime, I have at least two editions (different translations)....

9. John Steinbeck. The two great novels are The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden, and if I can make myself stop rereading those two books, I can move on to some of the other Steinbeck books I own.

10. George Eliot. Middlemarch is my favorite book of all time, but it might be time for me to stop rereading it and move on to the rest of her books. The story of Mary Ann Evans is pretty fascinating in itself, and reading her books gives me the opportunity to be in contact with her brilliant mind.

Which authors do you love so much that you own a lot of their books?