Asimov's Readings, Continued

Asimov continues to list the books he read as a youngster:

"I read E. Nesbitt's books and Howard Pyle's and George McDonald's. I even read Eugene Sue, which carries the Romantic Era to the extreme edge of indurability and had me constantly in tears.

But then I was crying all the time those days. I wept over Beth in Little Women, over Raoul, Athos and Porthos in The Man in the Iron Mask, over Smike in Nicholas Nickelby, and eventually learned, in my frequent re-readings, which chapters to skip.

...

What I didn't read was what the libraries of the 1920s and 1930s were poor in, and that was contemporary fiction. Or, if the libraries did have them, then I discovered them too late, after my literary tastes had solidified. Most twentieth century serious fiction is beyond me."

Asimov continued:
Mysteries and humor are another matter, of course. Of all twentieth-century writers I should say the two I have read most carefully and thoroughly, and have reread most assiduously and with undiminished delight, and Agatha Christie and PG Wodehouse.