基本信息
i entered high school having read hundreds of books. but i was not a good reader. merely bookish, i lacked a point of view when i read. rather, i read in order to get a point of view. i searched books for good expressions and sayings, pieces of information, ideas, themes—anything to enrich my thought and make me feel educated. when one of my teachers suggested to his sleepy tenth-grade english class that a person could not have a “complicated idea” until he had read at least two thousand bo oks, i heard the words without recognizin g either its irony (嘲讽) or its very complicated truth. i merely determined to make a list of all the books i had ever read. strict with myself, i included only once a title i might have read several times. (how, after all, could one read a book more than once?) and i included only those books over a hundred pages in length. (could anything shorter be a book?) there was yet another high school list i made. one day i came across a newspaper article about an english professor at a nearby state college. the article had a list of the “hundred most important books of western civilization.” “more than anything else in my life,” the professor told the reporter with finality, “these books have made me al
