Top Ten Tuesday

This week on Top Ten Tuesday, the ladies at The Broke and The Bookish have asked us to list our "Top Ten Authors That I'd Put On My Auto-Buy List" (basically an auto-buy list is no questions asked..you love this author so much that no matter what they wrote next you'd buy regardless of genre or subject matter). Ah, now THIS one is definitely an easy one for me!

Assuming these cannot be authors who've come back from the dead (because that would change things up for me quite a lot), my top ten auto-buy authors are:

Thrity Umrigar

1. Thrity Umrigar - In 2010, two of my top ten books were written by Umrigar (The Weight of Heaven and The Space Between Us). In 2012, The World We Found found it's way to my top ten. Is the woman even capable of writing a less than extremely interesting book?

2. Peter Geye - Safe From The Sea was by far and away my favorite book of 2011 and is a book I always recommend to both men and women. Geye followed that up with The Lighthouse Road which was also incredible. Two for two? Can't wait to see what he's working on now.

3. Ann Patchett - even when Patchett writes a book I don't absolutely love, I know it will still be a book that will challenge me and make me think (State of Wonder). And there is always that hope that one day she will give me another book I love as much as Bel Canto, one of my top five all-time favorite books.

4. Ami McKay - Like Geye, I've read two books by McKay (The Birth House and The Virgin Cure) and both have been incredible blends of historical fact and fiction. The Birth House is a book I always recommend to book clubs.

Alexandra Fuller

5. Alexandra Fuller - I'm sure that one day Fuller will run out of amazing memories of growing up in Africa, but so far she hasn't. Besides, she writes so beautifully, I'm sure that whatever she writes about will be well worth reading.

6. E. L. Doctorow - Even when he's pretentious, his writing is amazing. Ragtime remains one of my all-time favorite books 25 years after I first read it.

7. Jess Walter - Yep, another writer who's two for two for me. I quite enjoyed The Financial Lives of the Poets and was even more impressed by last year's Beautiful Ruins.

8. Ron Rash - First Serena and then The Cove - Rash impressed me as much for his ability to write memorable female characters as for his portrayal of life in the Appalachians.


9. Cathy Marie Buchanan - The woman is simply incredible at blending historical fact and fiction. Both The Day The Falls Stood Still and The Painted Girls are wonderful books that make excellent book club choices.

10 Jennie Nash - If you weren't wondering what took me so long to get to Nash, you haven't been reading this blog for very long. Nash creates characters that speak to me, who say things I can imagine myself saying. I'm always impressed, too, by the amazing amount of research she does.

Now if, by some miracle Charlotte Bronte, Edith Wharton and Jane Austen were to come back to life and start writing again, they would have to be added to the list.

What authors do you automatically buy every time they write a book?