The wickedest author to author insults
Is everyone up on the literary scandal du jour? The one where Salman Rushdie rated a couple dozen modern classics on Goodreads, and his clamorously low ratings for many of them ( To Kill a Mockingbird , three stars out of five?! Lucky Jim only one?!) were shared with the 30 million members of the site, as is the wont of a "social networking website", resulting in a few shocked people and much media kerfuffle? Sir Salman claims he didn't dream they would be on public view and he was just playing around, which sounded a lot like saying he didn't inhale, but he did stick up for his right not to like Kingsley Amis books, which has to count for something. Zero stars from me for The Independent , which described Sir Salman as having "sparked controversy with some trenchant opinions of some authors widely regarded as among the finest of their generation". Star-rating a book is not a "trenchant opinion"! Trenchant opinions are, well, trenchant: from t...