If I like a certain author, I pay attention to who's in their world, and it leads me to something else.
I will fall head over heels with a certain author (Anne Tyler, John Irving, Kurt Vonnegut when I was younger, Philip Roth and Melina Marchetta, David Mitchell more recently) and read every single thing they've ever written.
Boswell, in his journals, writes of Oliver Goldsmith showing him a couple of scandalous newspaper paragraphs about Johnson and Mrs. Thrale, reporting "how an eminent brewer was very jealous of a certain author in folio, and perceived a strong resemblance to him in his eldest son".
"I don't think there is such a thing as a bad book for children," he argued, adding that it was "snobbery and … foolishness" to suggest that a certain author or particular genre might be a baleful influence upon young reading minds — be it comic books or the works of R. L. Stine.
You can also join groups devoted to a certain author or type of book, like this group that is reading British literature.
Miss being able to blather on about Android versus iPhone or express your irrational hatred of a certain author, startup or device on TechCrunch, without having to attach your Facebook account (and don't want to go through all the trouble of creating a dummy Yahoo/Aol account)?
