On Recommending Books

I've always found it difficult to recommend books to people, not because there aren't dozens, maybe hundreds, of books I'd like to recommend, but because I know that what interests me is unlikely to interest someone else with a different personality and background.

I was gratified, therefore, when I read an article sent me by a friend (taken together with the first sentence that may sound ironic, I know) about the reading habits of Teddy Roosevelt (1858-1919). In the essay, which is excerpted from Roosevelt's autobiography, the 26th president is quoted as saying this:

I could not name any principle upon which the books [in his library] have been gathered. 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.

Roosevelt was a speed reader who could breeze through three books in a day! Many of us can't read three comic books in a day, but TR was reputed to have read tens of thousands of books in his lifetime, many in a foreign language. He goes on to say:

A book must be interesting to the particular reader at that particular time. But there are tens of thousands of interesting books, and some of them are sealed to some men and some are sealed to others; and some stir the soul at some given point of a man’s life and yet convey no message at other times. The reader, the booklover, must meet his own needs without paying too much attention to what his neighbors say those needs should be.

He must not hypocritically pretend to like what he does not like. Yet at the same time he must avoid that most unpleasant of all the indications of puffed-up vanity which consists in treating mere individual, and perhaps unfortunate, idiosyncrasy as a matter of pride.

This is certainly true, at least for me personally. Books that I read years ago with little profit were much more meaningful to me when reread years later. It's one reason why C.S. Lewis' advice that before you read a new book you should reread an old one has so much merit. As our minds grow and mature so, too, do our tastes and understanding.

It's deeply lamentable that Roosevelt's love of books is not more widely shared today. Books make life much richer than it would otherwise be, but it's hard to convince people of that in a day when television and cyberspace are so easily accessible and require so much less effort than does reading a book. In TR's day books were one of the few sources of entertainment so reading was a pastime much more widely engaged in than today.

In any case, having mentioned above that I find it difficult to recommend books, I'm going to do it anyway. I'm told that the two novels linked to at the top of this page, In the Absence of God and Bridging the Abyss, are exciting reads that provoke a great deal of thought. I encourage you to try them and let me know if you concur with that humble assessment.

Meanwhile, here are three quotes book lovers will appreciate:

"When I get a little money I buy books. If I have any left over I buy food and clothing." Erasmus

"If you have a garden and a library you have everything you need." Cicero

"Always read stuff that'll make you look good if you die in the middle of it." P.J. O'Rourke