THE BEST HUNDRED BOOKS.

Lyttelton Times, Volume LXV, Issue 7862, 18 May 1886, Page 6

THE BEST HUNDRED BOOKS.

TO THB EDITOR.

Sib, — I am only one—an ordinary person, leading an ordinary life in this City of the Plains ; a very ordinary person, indeed. I have never even assisted to make a list of the best hundred books; but on reading tbe account given in your columns of the result arrived at in the symposium of seven friends in council, it occurred to me that it would tend to the mutual edification and instruction of myself and sundry other ordinary persons of this city, if, through the medium of your paper, I. asked one or two very simple questions on the subject of these same books. For what purpose, then, or for whom, are these hundred books intended now that they have been selected by the seven friends ? That the selection of them would form an amusing and instructive means of spending an evening I can very well understand, for one would then hear the opinions of one’s friends on books that would seldom be mentioned in ordinary conversation ; blit if this was the object, why publish the list? Do the seven friends intend that they and other ordinary beings like them should endeavour to read those books of the hundred with which they are as yet unacquainted ? Let us hope not. Surely the best hundred hooks for one man are not the beet also for his neighbour, for does not Dogberry say, “ Alas ! all men are not alike I ” As one man’s mind differs from another’s, so will the books that it will be best for him to read, but if, besides these, we are to read also those books that are best for our friends, we shall, it seems to me, be in danger of losing our individuality ; we would tend to become all alike; our minds, instead of being our own, would be a compound of our own and those of our friends. We would, in fact, cease to be very ordinary persons, and the Philistines aforesaid would rightly call us “ insufferably pedantic prigs.”—l am, &c., “A COMMONPLACE YOUNG MAN.”