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How many authors bat 1.000?
Oct. 6th, 2008 07:49 pm(Note to non-baseball fans: "batting a thousand" means hitting the ball 100% of the time. It doesn't happen. Well, if you hit the very first pitch you are thrown, then you're batting a thousand for a brief period of time, anyway. . . )
Lis was just playing me an NPR story on David Macaulay and his new book on the human body. In the introduction, the reporter referred to him as a "one-man genre". He is an architect who writes books about how things are built. From Roman cities to castles, to sewer systems, to cathedrals, to mosques, to machines, and now, the human body.
And I made the comment to Lis that, yeah, "one-man genre is a good term for him, and, what's more, every one of those books is worth reading." And looking at the pictures. The pictures are great.
It got me thinking -- how many authors ARE there for whom every single book they've written is worth reading?
Harper Lee, of course. But that's kind of cheating. Jane Austen. I'd argue for Shakespeare, even if plenty of other folks think that at least a COUPLE of his plays suck. Who else?
Lis was just playing me an NPR story on David Macaulay and his new book on the human body. In the introduction, the reporter referred to him as a "one-man genre". He is an architect who writes books about how things are built. From Roman cities to castles, to sewer systems, to cathedrals, to mosques, to machines, and now, the human body.
And I made the comment to Lis that, yeah, "one-man genre is a good term for him, and, what's more, every one of those books is worth reading." And looking at the pictures. The pictures are great.
It got me thinking -- how many authors ARE there for whom every single book they've written is worth reading?
Harper Lee, of course. But that's kind of cheating. Jane Austen. I'd argue for Shakespeare, even if plenty of other folks think that at least a COUPLE of his plays suck. Who else?