毛姆的阅读趣味
Maugham, W. Somerset. Books and You. London and Toronto: William Heinemann Ltd., 1940.
毛姆曾应The Saturday Evening Post 之邀为普通读者介绍一些既有益又有趣的书籍(books could be read with pleasure and profit)。他一共写了三篇，分别谈论英国、欧洲和美国的文学作品。后来集结成书，加上了一篇序言。杂志要求每篇文章限于四千字以内，所以这本书很薄，加上序言也不过98页。毛姆在序言中说，他不是作为一名批评家，甚至也不是作为一位职业小说家来写这些谈阅读的文字，而是怀着一位对于人性有着适当兴趣的普通人（a plain man with a proper interest in humanity）的心态来写。因此文字平实清通，读起来畅快而实在。毛姆在序言里自信地宣称 This little book is necessarily slight, but I trust you, the reader, will not fine it superficial. 且让我们来看看毛姆的推荐。
英国
1. Defoe Moll Flanders
2. Swift Gulliver’s Travels
3. Fielding Tom Jones, the healthiest noel in English literature
4. Sterne Tristram Shandy, A Sentimental Journey
5. Boswell The Life of Samuel Johnson, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides
6. Johnson Lives of Poets
7. Gibbon Autobiography
8. Dickens David Copperfield
9. Butler The Way of All Flesh
10. Jane Austen Mansfield Park
11. Hazlitt Table talk; he is overshadowed by Charles Lamb
12. Thackeray Vanity Fair
13. Emily Bronte Wuthering Heights
14. George Eliot Middlemarch
15. Trollope The Eustace Diamonds
16. Meredith The Egoist
诗歌 （毛姆以为天才也写过不少劣作，读读好的选本即可）
Shakespeare
Palgrave’s Golden Treasury
Oxford Book of English Verse
English Galaxy of Shorter Poems, by Gerald Bullett.
欧洲
1. Cervantes Don Quixote
2. Montaigne Essays
3. Goethe Wilhelm Meister (Carlyle’s translation)
4. Turgenev Fathers and Sons
5. Tolstoy War and Peace
6. Dostoevsky Brothers Karamazov
7. Madame de le Fayette The Princess of Cleves (1678)
8. Prevost Manon Lescaut
9. Voltaire Candide
10. Jean-Jacques Rousseau The Confessions
11. Balzac Father Goriot
12. Stendhal The Red and the Black, The Charthouse of Parma (Maugham’s favorite novelist) 毛姆说司汤达是他最喜欢的作家。
13. Flaubert Madame Bovary
14. Benjamin Constant Adolphe
15. The Three Musketeers
16. Anatole France The Mother-of-Pearl Case
17. Marcel Proust
美国
1. Benjamin Franklin Autobiography (he is as truly the typical American as Doctor Johnson is as typical Englishman)
2. Herman Melville Moby Dick (His culture was European. His prose gives you the impression of having been founded on that of the great English stylists of the seventeenth century. 70)
3. Walt Whitman Leaves of Grass (it was really in Whitman that America became aware of itself in literature. 78)
4. Edgar Allan Poe
5. David Thoreau The Walden
6. Emerson read English Traits rather than Essays
7. Henry James Maugham prefers The American to The Ambassador
8. Mark Twain Huckleberry Finn
9. Parkman The Oregon Trail
10. Emily Dickinson (She is best read in anthologies. 74)
11. O. Henry, Ring Lardner, Theodore Dreisser, Sinclair Lewis, Willa Cather, Robert Frost, Vachel Lindsay, Eugene O’Neill and Edwin Arlington Robinson.
毛姆曾应The Saturday Evening Post 之邀为普通读者介绍一些既有益又有趣的书籍(books could be read with pleasure and profit)。他一共写了三篇，分别谈论英国、欧洲和美国的文学作品。后来集结成书，加上了一篇序言。杂志要求每篇文章限于四千字以内，所以这本书很薄，加上序言也不过98页。毛姆在序言中说，他不是作为一名批评家，甚至也不是作为一位职业小说家来写这些谈阅读的文字，而是怀着一位对于人性有着适当兴趣的普通人（a plain man with a proper interest in humanity）的心态来写。因此文字平实清通，读起来畅快而实在。毛姆在序言里自信地宣称 This little book is necessarily slight, but I trust you, the reader, will not fine it superficial. 且让我们来看看毛姆的推荐。
英国
1. Defoe Moll Flanders
2. Swift Gulliver’s Travels
3. Fielding Tom Jones, the healthiest noel in English literature
4. Sterne Tristram Shandy, A Sentimental Journey
5. Boswell The Life of Samuel Johnson, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides
6. Johnson Lives of Poets
7. Gibbon Autobiography
8. Dickens David Copperfield
9. Butler The Way of All Flesh
10. Jane Austen Mansfield Park
11. Hazlitt Table talk; he is overshadowed by Charles Lamb
12. Thackeray Vanity Fair
13. Emily Bronte Wuthering Heights
14. George Eliot Middlemarch
15. Trollope The Eustace Diamonds
16. Meredith The Egoist
诗歌 （毛姆以为天才也写过不少劣作，读读好的选本即可）
Shakespeare
Palgrave’s Golden Treasury
Oxford Book of English Verse
English Galaxy of Shorter Poems, by Gerald Bullett.
欧洲
1. Cervantes Don Quixote
2. Montaigne Essays
3. Goethe Wilhelm Meister (Carlyle’s translation)
4. Turgenev Fathers and Sons
5. Tolstoy War and Peace
6. Dostoevsky Brothers Karamazov
7. Madame de le Fayette The Princess of Cleves (1678)
8. Prevost Manon Lescaut
9. Voltaire Candide
10. Jean-Jacques Rousseau The Confessions
11. Balzac Father Goriot
12. Stendhal The Red and the Black, The Charthouse of Parma (Maugham’s favorite novelist) 毛姆说司汤达是他最喜欢的作家。
13. Flaubert Madame Bovary
14. Benjamin Constant Adolphe
15. The Three Musketeers
16. Anatole France The Mother-of-Pearl Case
17. Marcel Proust
美国
1. Benjamin Franklin Autobiography (he is as truly the typical American as Doctor Johnson is as typical Englishman)
2. Herman Melville Moby Dick (His culture was European. His prose gives you the impression of having been founded on that of the great English stylists of the seventeenth century. 70)
3. Walt Whitman Leaves of Grass (it was really in Whitman that America became aware of itself in literature. 78)
4. Edgar Allan Poe
5. David Thoreau The Walden
6. Emerson read English Traits rather than Essays
7. Henry James Maugham prefers The American to The Ambassador
8. Mark Twain Huckleberry Finn
9. Parkman The Oregon Trail
10. Emily Dickinson (She is best read in anthologies. 74)
11. O. Henry, Ring Lardner, Theodore Dreisser, Sinclair Lewis, Willa Cather, Robert Frost, Vachel Lindsay, Eugene O’Neill and Edwin Arlington Robinson.
