More Gaps in My Reading List

Sarah points out an appreciation of Ross Thomas in the Boston Globe which makes me even more sorry that I haven't gotten around to reading his books yet.

Meanwhile, in The Guardian, Henry Shukman makes a case for Somerset Maugham, with a comparison to Maupassant thrown in for good measure.

"So why is his reputation so low in Britain? For one thing, he tends to gets judged by his worst work... It's as if some strange grudge lingers in the literary air. It's all the odder that it seems to have cleared in America, in spite of Edmund Wilson's double-damning of Maugham (twice he attacked him in the 1950s as the ultimate in "mediocre"). But Americans read short stories, and perhaps that makes the difference."

We do? Well, at any rate... Oh, Shukman also mentions in passing a recent swipe at Maugham by Christopher Hitchens in The Atlantic Monthly, which includes a line you could unpack for hours: "An ideal way to 'lock in' homosexual disposition is probably to spend time as a gynecologist in a slum district of London..."