Overnight reading: The New Oxford Anthology of Literary Anecdotes. Most of it surprisingly dull stuff; even Congreve, even Gore Vidal. About the only anecdotes that didn't bore were those of Robert Louis Stevenson (especially Henry Adams' malicious little vignette of Stevenson the crypto-Presbyterian moralist), Henry James, Oliver Goldsmith, Samuel Johnson, Gertrude Stein, and of course the lovely little come-uppance given his local vicar by Edward FitzGerald. 'Twas satisfying to read of William James's humiliation in the horse-car to Boston (I've never liked Henry's brother, never found his writings in the least insightful or interesting--and I am happy to have all my instinctive aversion from the man and his works vindicated). The interest in it all is how similarly hatefully boring/appalling are the anecdotes of the first several hundred years of English literature, and the last hundred, of the latter of which the vile/insufferable Evelyn Waugh's confiscation and devouring of his starving children's bananas in front of them--vouchsafing them nary a bite--serves as a horrifying epitome.