![]() ![]() I never thought about reading anything by Alistair MacLean until, at the Des Moines Salvation Army earlier this month, I stumbled on a crumbling 1957 paperback edition of H.M.S. It was also my interest in British military history that led me to dip my toe again into the mainstream fiction pool this week with a novel by Alistair MacLean, author of The Guns of Navarone. What does interest me is British military history, and so the obvious exceptions to my aversion from popular mainstream fiction would be all those Sharpe books by Bernard Cornwell I read as a teen, and the 15 or so Aubrey and Maturin books by Patrick O'Brian I read in my thirties. Those sorts of things do not interest me. Somerset Maugham and James Dickey (I read Deliverance right before I moved to the Middle West) qualify as mainstream popular fiction, though I like to think of those writers as "literary figures." When I worked at a bookstore in northern New Jersey in the mid-90s all the bestsellers seemed to be either about lawyers and serial killers chasing each other, or knock-offs of Bridges of Madison County. I don't really read much bestselling mainstream popular fiction, Tom Clancy, John Grisham, that sort of thing. ![]()
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