Choosing Books

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Excerpt from Choosing Books: A LectureWhen first I went to school, a good many years ago, an older boy told me that Robinson Crusoe was the best book he had ever read. That winter he lent me the volume, and I felt sorely grieved when my father said that the work was mere fiction, that there had never been any real Crusoe or his man Friday. Soon afterward another schoolmate lent me Dana's Two Years Before the Mast, but its truth did not stir me as did the marvellously invented chapters of Defoe. And so my reading went on month by month, year by year. As one of the youngest boys in our class, I listened to what other boys said about books really worth while. And thus, without planning it at all, I began to depend upon better informed folk than myself in choosing my books, and that practice became a habit useful to me ever since. To be sure, my first counsellors in the school-yard varied a good deal in knowledge and in soundness of judgment. I can remember a dozen paltry romances, imitated from cooper, that swept through our school in a whirlwind of popularity, forerunning the Harka way series of a later day. And yet, in the main, so sensible was the pilotage I enjoyed, that by the time I was fourteen or so I had read Scott's Guy Mannering and Quentin Durward, Haw thorne's House of the Seven Gables, Cooper's Last of the Mohicans Dickens' Oliver Twist and David Copperfield, Thackeray's Henry Esmond and that capital story of whaling adventure, Moby Dick, by Herman Melville. Even in those distant days it was plain that boys find interest in the shelves of grown-up folk. Indeed many of the books written for boys, such as the Henty series, have a distinct ¿avor of milk and water, with a good deal more water than milk. Incomparably better are the novels of Scott and cooper, Stevenson and Kipling, as keenly relished by manly boys as by men who continue to be boys as long as they live.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.