rations of readers. If only a few, let them be books of highest
character and established fame. Such books are easily found even in
small public libraries.

For the purpose of this chapter, which is to aid in forming a taste for
reading, there should be no confusion of choice by naming too many
books of one author. If you read one and like it, you can easily find
another.

It is a cardinal rule that if you do not like a book, do not read it.
What another likes, you may not. Any book list is suggestive; it can
be binding only on those who prize it. Like attracts like.

Did you ever think that the thing you are looking for is looking for
you; that it is the very law of affinities to get together?

If you are coarse in your tastes, vicious in your tendencies, you do
not have to work very hard to find coarse vicious books; they are
seeking you by the very law of attraction.

One's taste for reading is much like his taste for food. Dull books
are to be avoided, as one refuses food disagreeable to him; to someone
else the book may not be dull, nor the food disagreeable. Whole
nations may eat cabbage, or stale fish, while I like neither.
Ultimately, therefore, every reader must make his own selection, and
find the book that finds him. Any one not a random reader will soon
select a short shelf of books that he may like better than a longer
shelf that exactly suits some one else. Either will be a shelf of good
books, neither a shelf of the best books, since if best for you or me,
they may not be best for everybody.

A most learned man in India, in turning the leaves of a book, as he
read, felt a little prick in his finger; a tiny snake dropped out and
wriggled out of sight. The pundit's finger began to swell, then his
arm; and in an hour, he was dead.

Who has not noticed in the home a snake in a book that has changed the
character of a boy through its moral poison so that he was never quite
the same again?

How well did Carlyle divide books into sheep and goats.

It is probable that the careers of the majority of criminals in our
prisons to-day might have been vastly different if the character of
their reading when young had been different; had it been up-lifting,
wholesome, instead of degrading.

"Christian Endeavor" Clark read a notice conspicuously posted in a
large city:--"All boys should read the wonderful story of the desperado
brothers of the Western plains, whose strange and thrilling adventures
o