I. What helps you guess the author of the passage? What is the author's name?

II. How do you know that it is a passage from a detective story?

III. Have you read any short stories by the author? Tell one of them.

V

At eighteen I knew French, German, and some Italian, but Г was extremely uneducated and I was deeply conscious of my ignorance. I read everything that came my way. I suppose it gained me a certain amount of general knowledge which is useful for the novelist to have. One never knows when an out of the way bit of information will come in handy. I made lists of what I read and one of these lists by some accident I still have. It is my reading for two months and, but that I made it only for myself, I could not believe that it was veracious. It shows that I read three of Shakespeare's plays, two volumes of Mommsen’s.

299

History of Rome, a large part of Lanson's Liiteralure Francaise, two or three novels, some of the French classics, a couple of-scientific works, and a play of Ibsen's. I was indeed the industrious apprentice. During the time I was at St Thomas's Hospital I went systematically through English, French, Italian, and Latin literature. I read a lot of history, a little philosophy, and a good deal of science. My curiosity was too great to allow me to give much time to reflect upon what I read; I could hardly wait to finish one book, so eager was I to begin another. This was always an adventure, and I would start upon a famous work as excitedly as a reasonable young man would go in to bat for his side or a nice girl go to a dance. Now and then journalists in search of copy ask me what is the most thrilling moment of my life. If I were not ashamed to, I might answer that it is the moment when I began to read Goethe's Faust. I have never quite lost this feeling, and even now the first pages of a book sometimes send the blood racing through my veins. To me reading is a rest as to oth'er people conversation or a game of cards. It is more than that; it is a necessity, and if I am deprived of it for a little while I find myself as irritable as the addict deprived of his drug. I would sooner read a time-table or a catalogue than nothing at all.

And yet, though I have read so much, I am a bad reader. 1 read slowly and I am a poor skipper. I find it difficult to leave a book, however bad and however much it bores me, unfinished. I could count on my fingers the number of books that I have not read from cover to cover. On the other hand there are few books that I have read twice. I know very well that there are many of which I cannot get the full value on a single reading, but in that they have given me all I was capable of getting at the time, and this, though I may forget their details, remains a permanent enrichment. I know people who read the same book over and over again. It can only be that they read with their eyes and not with their sensibility. It is a mechanical exercise like the Tibetan's turning of a pray ing-wheel. It is doubtless a harmless occupation, but they are wrong if they think it an intelligent one.

(From "The Summing Up" by S. Maugham)

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION