The Completest Reader
Dear Reader,
I had mentioned the completest reader in last week’s post so it seemed appropriate to continue on my promise to discuss this type of reader, one who is more common than you might expect.
The completest reader comes primarily in two forms: either that person is compelled to read every book by a particular writer (often paired with the desire to have every such work in their personal library) or that person feels compelled to read everything from a particular writer—essays, private letters, private journals, books, marginalia, whatever medium might be found containing that writer’s words.
The Book Collector
If this type of completest reader struck you as deeply sympathetic with the must-finish reader, you’d be right. While they are certainly not the same—many a must-finish reader does not double as a completest reader—the completest reader and the must-finish reader possess overlapping sympathies.
There’s quite a range of people who fit into this category of the completest reader: you have your David Baldacci obsessives alongside your Anthony Trollope aficionados. That is, the completest reader isn’t a fancy reader by any stretch; questions of quality are not involved. A completest reader might desire to read everything by Gene Stratton-Porter or Cicero or Tom Clancy. What makes the completest reader the completest reader is simply this: they have read, or intend to read, every book by their self-selected author(s).
As a quick side note, the series finisher is a subset of this type of completest reader—indeed, the series finisher best highlights the overlap between the completest reader and the must-finish reader. The series finisher might not read other works by that author (e.g. someone who reads all the Harry Potter books but doesn’t bother with Rowling’s other novels, penname or otherwise). But the series finisher is a completest reader in the sense that they are finishing the series they’re reading, whether it’s two books or twenty-two of them.
The Enthusiast
I wanted to title this “The Obsessive,” but, er, that felt a little too on the nose.
This sort of completest reader might be considered the hobbyist. While I don’t personally intend to read Douglas Walton’s every letter, I’ve given slight taste of the hobbyist’s approach in “Reading in Memoriam.” The hobbyist might read all of Randolph Bourne or E.B. White or Malcolm Gladwell or Rosemary Sutcliff’s writings.
The enthusiast can also be the scholar, the one set on archiving or re-interpreting a public figure’s entire oeuvre. (To be clear, I’m not suggesting that all academics are completest readers. Their workarounds to actual reading are too well documented for that to be true. But an idealized sense of the academic reader certainly pairs with enthusiasm.)
A small aside here: the book collector can turn into the enthusiast, so buyer beware, I guess. What I mean by this is that the line between the two types of the completest reader is neither hard-set nor absolute. And I think many a would-be enthusiast has happily “settled” for being the book collector variant of completest reader, once the tedium of oft-repeated phrases from letter to letter was observed.
If you happen to have a bent towards learning, which isn’t always the same as having a bent towards reading (one can technically read for sheer entertainment with no intent of learning a thing), you might be wondering if there’s a hierarchy between the two “types” of completest readers as outlined in this newsletter. On that subject, I’ll have to leave you to your own judgments.
For myself, I don’t think there’s a hierarchy, at least not necessarily. I can read E.A. Burtt’s early seminal works and ignore his bizarre ruminations at the end of his career. I don’t feel the need to “complete” my studies of him, nor do I think my reflections on his keen, earlier writings will be enhanced by his later metaphysical kookiness, unless I’m up for a cautionary tale or something like that.
I also think that one can glean a pretty coherent comprehension of the central corpus of Robert Louis Stevenson or John Locke or Mary Wollstonecraft or Hannah Arendt without needing to attend to their every pen scratch, as notable and worthy as such endeavors are.
Still, there’s a tension at play. What do you make of it?
Kreigh
P.S. I’m considering writing an expansion piece on one of the themes explored in “Congruous Incongruities” which weirdly stands as one of my favorite things I’ve written for this newsletter. (And that I’d forgotten I had written.) The expansion piece would focus more on the experience of the reading what you don’t understand, while also addressing some of the territory of what happens if you never understand it. If you’d like to see this piece, email me. If I receive no requests for it, I’ll quite easily attend to the long list of already-in-draft pieces.