Ten Years of Old Books by Dead Guys

Recapping the first decade
The Old Books by Dead Guys blog turns ten years old today! The first post back on January 6, 2011 was a review of Emile Zola’s novel Thérèse Raquin. One decade and 1,181 blog posts later we’ve reviewed Zola’s complete works, as well as the complete works of Jack London, Frank Norris, and a few others, while continuing to chip away at the extensive oeuvres of many other classic writers, including the usual suspects listed below. Here is a nutshell recap of the highlights from ten years of active and curious reading.

Most Reviewed Authors
Writers with the most blog posts devoted to books by or about them.

  
Pictured: Simak (6th), Sinclair (7th), Simenon (9th)

1. Jack London (80 reviews)
Best books include The Iron Heel, The Call of the Wild, Martin Eden, Before Adam, The Faith of Men, Moon-Face, The Road, John Barleycorn. The best biographies of London are Earle Labor’s Jack London: An American Life and Irving Stone’s Sailor on Horseback. The most viewed blog post at Old Books by Dead Guys, by far, is my list of The Best Short Stories of Jack London.

2. Emile Zola (54 reviews)
Best books include Germinal, La Terre, Pot-Bouille, The Debacle, L’Assomoir, Paris, The Death of Olivier Becaille, The Flood. Frederic Brown’s comprehensive biography Zola: A Life is also a good read.

3. Honoré de Balzac (39 reviews)
Best books include Père Goriot, Cousin Bette, Lost Illusions, Eugénie Grandet, The Hidden Masterpiece, Farewell, also the biography Honoré de Balzac: His Life and Writings by Mary Frances Sandars.

4 (tie). Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (33 reviews)
Best books include The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, A Study in Scarlet, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Great Shadow, The Captain of the Polestar, The Doings of Raffles Haw.

4 (tie). H. Beam Piper (33 reviews)
Best books include Police Operation, Genesis, Flight from Tomorrow, The Edge of the Knife, Little Fuzzy. Find them all in The H. Beam Piper Megapack.

6. Clifford D. Simak (30 reviews)
Best books include Way Station, City, Mastodonia, and the excellent series The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak.

7. Upton Sinclair (28 reviews)
Best books include The Jungle, 100%: The Story of a Patriot, and the Lanny Budd series.

8. Frank Norris (22 reviews)
Best books include The Octopus, McTeague, The Third Circle, The Pit, Moran of the Lady Letty. Read the post Frank Norris: An Overview for more info.

9. Georges Simenon (21 reviews)
Best books include Dirty Snow, Tropic Moon, and the Inspector Maigret mysteries The Late Monsieur Gallet, A Man’s Head, The Night at the Crossroads, Maigret and the Fortuneteller, Maigret and the Killer.

10 (tie). Pearl S. Buck (17 reviews)
Best books include The Good Earth, Sons, A House Divided, Dragon Seed, The Promise, Command the Morning.

10 (tie). Henryk Sienkiewicz (17 reviews)
Best books include With Fire and Sword, The Deluge, Pan Michael, Quo Vadis. Of related interest: The Memoirs of Jeremiah Curtin (Sienkiewicz’s English translator).

12. Jack Kirby (15 reviews)
Kirby is known for his art more than his writing, but as one of Marvel Comics’ pioneering creators he did both. Some of his best work can be found in Essential Fantastic Four, Volume 1 and Essential Captain America, Volume 5. Mark Evanier’s Kirby: King of Comics is a great biography and retrospective of his art.

13 (tie). Hermann Hesse (14 reviews)
Best books include Steppenwolf, Siddhartha, Narcissus and Goldmund, Gertrude, Knulp. My post The Fiction of Hermann Hesse gives an overview of his career.

13 (tie). Frank Herbert (14 reviews)

Best books include Dune, Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, and God Emperor of Dune. If you get that far you might as well read Heretics of Dune, Chapterhouse: Dune, and The Dune Encyclopedia. His best non-Dune book that I’ve encountered is Soul Catcher.

13 (tie). Alexander von Humboldt (14 reviews)

The best books about Humboldt are The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf and The Passage to Cosmos by Laura Dassow Walls. Books written by Humboldt include Views of Nature and his three-volume Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America During the Years 1799-1804.

  
Pictured: Kirby (12th), Herbert (13th), Humboldt (13th)

Most Reviewed Nations
While American, French, and English literature lead the pack as far as books reviewed, Old Books by Dead Guys likes to explore books of many nations. Below are the most frequently visited literary destinations.

1. American (568 reviews) 🇺🇸
Jack London, Frank Norris, Upton Sinclair, James Fenimore Cooper, Katherine Anne Porter, John Steinbeck

2. French (187 reviews) 🇫🇷
Emile Zola, Honoré de Balzac, Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, Jules Verne

3. English (162 reviews) 🇬🇧
H.G. Wells, Charles Darwin, Joseph Conrad, Bertrand Russell; also includes the Scottish authors (below)

4. German (49 reviews) 🇩🇪
Hermann Hesse, Paul Heyse, Karl Marx, Alexander von Humboldt, Ernst Haeckel

5. Scottish (44 reviews) 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sir Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson

6. Canadian (42 reviews) 🇨🇦
Margaret Atwood, Harold Bindloss, Brian Moore, Mazo de la Roche, Grant Allen, Hugh MacLennan, and art books featuring Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven 

7. Polish (39 reviews) 🇵🇱
Henryk Sienkiewicz, Wladyslaw Reymont, Boleslaw Prus, Adam Mickiewicz

8. Mexican (29 reviews) 🇲🇽
Juan Rulfo, Mariano Azuela, Carlos Fuentes, artists Diego Rivera and Leopoldo Mendéz

9. Belgian (25 reviews) 🇧🇪
Georges Simenon, Maurice Maeterlinck

10. Chinese (24 reviews) 🇨🇳
Pearl S. Buck (American raised in China), Confucius, Lu Xun, Mo Yan, and some Chinese-language textbooks

11. Russian (23 reviews) 🇷🇺
Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev, Boris Pasternak, Mikhail Sholokhov

12. Norwegian (18 reviews) 🇳🇴
Knut Hamsun, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Alexander Kielland, Thor Heyerdahl

13. Swedish (12 reviews) 🇸🇪
Selma Lagerlöf, Frans G. Bengtsson, Werner von Heidenstam, August Strindberg

14 (tie). Danish (10 reviews) 🇩🇰, Greek (10 reviews) 🇬🇷, Italian (10 reviews) 🇮🇹

Top Ten Most Reviewed Genres and Subjects
These categories of subject, format, genre, and/or chronology are the most tagged among OBDG’s 1,181 reviews. Some books fit into more than one category.

1. Classic Literature (697 reviews)

2. Modern Literature  (331 reviews)

3. Adventure (247 reviews)

4. Science Fiction (205 reviews)

5. Short Stories (200 reviews)

6. Biography (152 reviews)

7. Nobel Prize (150 reviews) See the complete list of Nobel reviews here.

8. Pulp Fiction (141 reviews)

9. History (129 reviews)

10. Recent books (120 reviews)


Best Omnibus Posts
Occasionally Old Books by Dead Guys publishes a post that doesn’t focus on a single book, but rather explores a particular author, topic, or theme. 

100 Five-Star Books

The Rougon-Macquart Cycle by Émile Zola

The Best Short Stories of Jack London

The Novels of Jack London

Jack London’s Nonfiction

Frank Norris: An Overview

The Fiction of Hermann Hesse

Celebrating Polish Literature

Historical Novels of the Ancient World

Literature of the “Soil”: Agrarian Epics from Around the World

Rock and Roll (Auto)biographies

Around the World with Old Books by Dead Guys
(Books from 40 nations)

Here’s to another 10 years! Keep on reading Old Books by Dead Guys!