I just stumbled across
this neat article about the United States' 26th president, Teddy Roosevelt, and his rules for reading. Apparantly he was quite a voracious reader. I never knew! I thought I would re-list the rules here. What do you think? I love number 3.
1. “The room for choice is so limitless that to my
mind it seems absurd to try to make catalogues which shall be supposed
to appeal to all the best thinkers. This is why I have no sympathy
whatever with writing lists of
the One Hundred Best Books, or
the Five-Foot Library. It is all right for a man to amuse himself by composing
a
list of a hundred very good books… But there is no such thing as a
hundred books that are best for all men, or for the majority of men, or
for one man at all times.”
2. “A book must be interesting to the particular reader at that particular time.”
3. “Personally, the books by which I have profited
infinitely more than by any others have been those in which profit was a
by-product of the pleasure; that is, I read them because I enjoyed
them, because I liked reading them, and the profit came in as part of
the enjoyment.”
4. “The reader, the booklover, must meet his own
needs without paying too much attention to what his neighbors say those
needs should be.”
5. “He must not hypocritically pretend to like what he does not like.”
6. “Books are almost as individual as friends. There
is no earthly use in laying down general laws about them. Some meet the
needs of one person, and some of another; and each person should beware
of the booklover’s besetting sin, of what Mr. Edgar Allan Poe calls
‘the mad pride of intellectuality,’ taking the shape of arrogant pity
for the man who does not like the same kind of books.”
7. “Now and then I am asked as to ‘what books a
statesman should read,’ and my answer is, poetry and novels – including
short stories under the head of novels.”
8. “Ours is in no sense a collector’s library. Each
book was procured because some one of the family wished to read it. We
could never afford to take overmuch thought for the outsides of books;
we were too much interested in their insides.”
9. “[We] all need more than anything else to know
human nature, to know the needs of the human soul; and they will find
this nature and these needs set forth as nowhere else by the great
imaginative writers, whether of prose or of poetry.”
10. “Books are all very well in their way, and we love them at Sagamore Hill; but children are better than books.”
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