Ruminations on reading lists

Abstract

In the Garden of Eden there must have happened one thing of importance which is omitted from the Extracts From Adam's Diary, by Mark Twain. After Eve named all the animals, I am sure that she and Adam made a list of them and selected the best ten or twenty for close company perhaps, or they may have compiled a list of those with whom their children should not associate. I think the tiger was on this last named list. According to Mark Twain, Adam, at least, was busy, except on Sunday. If he had started listing or cataloging the animals as Eve named them, he would have petitioned for more Sundays instead of just barely surviving one Sunday each week. Eve was engrossed by her new park with its new animals; her primary interest was Adam, and, later, her children. But she had time to put up the sign Keep off the grass and This way to Goat Island and that before Cain and Abel were born. No mention is made of story telling. Of course the Garden of Eden was a most dismal place for continued residence, for there were no books. But there must have been stories. Had there been a repertoire of stories, undoubtedly, Eve would have had her mental catalog of the Stories Abel Liked Best and the Songs for the Baby's First Five Years. The ten best stories for Cain wouldn't have been the ten best stories for Abel, but Eve would have had individual lists for each child. Seven stories might have been common to both lists. A reading list is an enumeration of three or more books or articles recommended or suggested for reading. These titles are selected because they have something in common each with the others. The avowed purpose of any reading list is to stimulate reading. It would lead to less ineffectual reading, less waste of time on nugatory material; and, as a consequence, there should be more time for the reading of material that is meaningful, and it is the purpose of reading lists to point out such materials. Arnold Bennett asks: Does there, I wonder, exist a being who has read all, or approximately all, that the person of average culture is supposed to have read, and that not to have read is a social sin. If such a person does exist, surely he is an old, a very old man, who has read steadily that which he ought to have read sixteen hours a day, from early infancy. I cannot recall a single author of whom I have read everything-even of Jane Austen. I have never seen Susan and The Watsons, one of which I have been told is superlatively good. Then there are large tracts of Shakespeare, Bacon, Spenser, nearly all Chaucer, Congreve, Dryden, Pope, Swift, Sterne, Johnson, Scott, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, Edgeworth, Ferrier, Lamb, Leigh Hunt, Wordsworth (nearly all), Tennyson, Swinburne, The Brontes, George Eliot, W. Morris, George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, Savage Landor, Thackeray, Carlyle-in fact, every classical author and most good modern authors, which I have never even overlooked. A list of the masterpieces I have not read would fill a volume. With only one author can I call myself familiar, Jane Austen.