One Hundred Best Books / With Commentary and an Essay on Books and Reading

E-text prepared by Ted Garvin, Keith M. Eckrich, and the Project Gutenberg
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With Commentary and an Essay on Books and Reading
1916
This selection of One hundred best books is made after a different method and with a different purpose from the selections already in existence. Those apparently are designed to stuff the minds of young persons with an accumulation of standard learning calculated to alarm and discourage the boldest. The following list is frankly subjective in its choice; being indeed the selection of one individual, wandering at large and in freedom through these realms of gold.
The compiler holds the view that in expressing his own predilection, he is also supplying the need of kindred minds; minds that read purely for the pleasure of reading, and have no sinister wish to transform themselves by that process into what are called cultivated persons. The compiler feels that any one who succeeds in reading, with reasonable receptivity, the books in this list, must become, at the end, a person with whom it would be a delight to share that most classic of all pleasurable arts—the art of intelligent conversation.
There is scarcely any question, the sudden explosion of which out of a clear sky, excites more charming perturbation in the mind of a man—professionally, as they say, of letters —than the question, so often tossed disdainfully off from young and ardent lips, as to what one should read, if one has—quite strangely and accidentally—read hitherto absolutely nothing at all.
To secure the privilege of being the purveyor of spiritual germination to such provocatively virgin soil, is for the moment so entirely exciting that all the great stiff images from the dusty museum of standard authors, seem to swim in a sort of blurred mist before our eyes, and even, some of them at least, to nod and beckon and put out their tongues. After a while, however, the shock of first excitement diminishing, that solemn goblin Responsibility lifts up its head, and though we bang at it and shoo it away, and perhaps lock it up, the pure sweet pleasure of our seductive enterprise, the native hue, as the poet says, of our resolution is henceforth sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, and the fine design robbed of its freshest dew.