The Accidental Completionist - Reactor

There’s a new Sarah Hall book out this week, Helm, and it looks incredible. It’s about a wind. The Guardian called it “vastly ambitious, serious—but also often playful and ironic.” I can’t wait to read it; I’ve been reading Hall off and on for twenty years, and was just last month obsessed with the sentences in her debut, Haweswater. 

But I haven’t even considered picking up Helm yet, because I haven’t gotten through all her other novels. 

Yet. 

This is not how I used to read. For decades I’ve been perfectly willing to skip through a writer’s backlist, picking up some novels and putting off others. For all my love for Gregory Maguire’s Wicked Years books, I only got around to his 2015 novel After Alice earlier this year. I’ve still got a Helen Oyeyemi or two on the shelf; I’ve got huge holes in my China Mieville reading; I can’t begin to math out how long it will take me to get to every Percival Everett book, though I will. I will. Someday. Just like I’ll get to that last William Gibson I haven’t read, and N.K. Jemisin’s short story collection, and Ann Leckie’s The Raven Tower, and… you get the gist. There are authors I’ve loved since I was a teen, and yet I’m not sure I even know what all their books are.

It feels a little bit embarrassing to mention all these books I haven’t read, though I know we all have these mental lists: Books I Know I Know I KNOW I Should Have Read Already. None of my failure to pick up these particular books is for lack of interest (though it is just factually true that there is never enough time to read all the books I would like to read). It’s just a product of the way I’ve always read: moodily. Scattershot. On deadline, sometimes. I read like anyone: new books that sound good, old books that come recommended by friends, things that catch my eye in the bookstore, things that I read something intriguing about. 

Just not, generally, in a completionist manner. Sometimes this is a matter of saving myself a book for when I really, really need it, or for some later date when I’m really going to want it. It’s like squirreling away a treat in the freezer so that some dark day, you’ve got an unexpected sweetness waiting for you: Some books I’m just not ready for yet. (I may or may not be saving Saint Death’s Herald for myself like this. I haven’t quite decided yet.) Sometimes it’s just the randomness of reading and choosing and going about life.

But I started to notice, in the last few years, how much I liked knowing an author’s entire oeuvre. There are writers I’ve been reading consistently since they started publishing, from Kelly Link (2001’s Stranger Things Happen, though I read it a little later) to Kristen Cashore (2008’s Graceling) to authors who began publishing more recently, like Yume Kitasei (2023’s The Deep Sky) and Bora Chung, whose work began being translated into English with Cursed Bunny. Ever since Seraphina, I’ve never missed a Rachel Hartman book; ditto for every David Mitchell book since Cloud Atlas. (I went back to his previous novels after reading that one; completionism doesn’t require reading things in order, or being there at the start. It’s just thoroughness, in whichever way.)

I wasn’t fully aware of this shift in my reading habits until I read Kitasei’s latest novel, Saltcrop—her third in three years. I was thinking about that pace of release, how hard that must be to maintain, and I was thinking about the things the books had in common or didn’t. Her second novel, The Stardust Grail, is by far my favorite, and I thought about sophomore albums—how bands often have so much pressure after a hit debut that the sophomore effort just doesn’t live up to it. That was very much not the case with that book.

Those of us that read big SFF series can be completionists by accident: When an author debuts with a series, and you like that series, it’s not like you’re going to stop reading it, whether it’s Jemisin’s Inheritance Trilogy or Tamsyn Muir’s Locked Tomb or Bethany Jacobs’ Kindom Trilogy. A series is a thought unto itself, a sentence that should draw the reader along to its close. Non-series books can be easier to skip around with. I’ve certainly done enough of it. I just don’t really want to anymore. I want to know: I want to watch writers grow from book to book, to follow the way their interests shift and their style adapts as they do more and more work. I want to be aware of the through-lines—sometimes overt, sometimes understated—between early short stories and big fat debut novels (yes, I’m thinking of Kelly Link in this moment!). 

How big can I make this picture? That’s the question I seem to be asking myself when I’m reading these days. I absolutely could not read H.G. Parry’s A Far Better Thing until I finally got around to A Tale of Two Cities, though Dickens took me ages longer than Parry (and made so much more sense once Parry got a hold of him! Which I realize is sacrilege, but still). Then I had to read all of Parry’s other books—even the historical fantasies I might once have thought didn’t interest me. Now, there’s a particular delicious frustration that comes with reading an excellent debut: How long will I have to wait to see what they do next? Will Ursula Whitcher return to the world she so gorgeously created in North Continent Ribbon? When will Gina María Balibrera write a follow-up to The Volcano Daughters? What’s next for Emet North, or for Cynthia Zhang?

The next step, of course, is to read all the books that inspired each author, though that step requires even more time that I do not presently have. (Moving is exhausting and time-consuming!) 

Once upon a time I found it easier to read in a bubble, to step into some fantastical world and then step out again. Now I want to trace all the paths in and out, to see where they’ve come from, and where they’re headed. I keep asking myself why this reading shift is happening in my habits now, and I keep coming back to context. I am a big fan of context in just about any situation (please never ask me if we can just have a quick chat without at least giving me some idea about whether or not I’m in trouble in some way). But lately it feels especially necessary—necessary to keep one’s head on straight about the reality we live in, as opposed to the reality that various forces in power would like to create. I’m compelled to seek out context for every weird piece of news I read: Who is writing this, and why, and what is the aim, and what did the people quoted in this piece hope to accomplish, and how much should I worry about whatever comes next? So it only tracks that I would be craving context in my reading as well: Where is this author coming from, where have they been, what are their regular concerns and areas of interest, how have they grown, how have they changed? And how will I change while I read them?