The author is being provocative in order to be noticed, and his strategy worked. He could have articulated the same point in another way.
Everyday every reader faces a choice between exploration and exploitation, between reading someone new and strange, or something more written by someone he knows. Both are necessary. If you don't explore, you'll never find the writers you truly love. If you don't exploit, you will never truly know them.
And there's a balance to be struck between the two strategies, a balance that varies over time. "Read widely" could be interpreted as anti-obsession, while "read narrowly" is clearly anti-discovery. But readers need to both discover and obsess, and discovery necessarily comes first.
Guriel doesn't talk about how he discovers the next object of his obsession, he glosses over the discovery phase in order to emphasize the obsession. In a perfect world, we would simply move from one great writer to the next without disappointments or slack time. It doesn't always happen that way.
Some people are born into families, institutions and social circles that will lead them straight to the great writers. The lucky ones have access to a cultural lineage that shows them the breadth and possibility of art. Curation aids their discovery.
Others, like me, will waste many years on pap and not know for years what they're missing. Garcia Marquez spent his adolescence reading stilted poetry before Kafka showed him, as a young man, what prose could do with the first sentence of The Metamorphosis [0], or before Mrs. Dalloway taught him how language could handle time.[1]
But I guess the point is that any given moment we face a tradeoff between exploration and exploitation. We have to choose which is more promising: another volume of our current obsession or taking a risk on an unknown.
In my experience, the obsession always wins, and it also always ends, not because the reader becomes tired of the writer, but because the writer produces a finite body of work, and after we read it all, we're back to blindly groping the shelves.
So long term, we have to find something new, and the real question that's not being addressed here is: What kind of new? Do I move on from one author of mystery novels [action thrillers, Harlequin romances, substitute genre here] to another? Or do I seek out categorically new kinds of pleasure?
Anyone who's read enough knows there is good writing and bad writing in every genre and every national literature, and so your meta-genres become just good or bad writing, no matter what the writing is about. That discovery comes slowly after a lonely slog in the wilderness of mass media, or it comes quickly, when one of your friends presses a book in your hands and says "Read this."
[0] http://petitchou.tumblr.com/post/225168928/various-translati...
[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=XJE_CwAAQBAJ&pg=PT11&lpg=P...