'I Should Have Read Nothing But Good Books'

“Every book I read is a not altogether negligible portion of my lifetime reading. Why did I not follow a careful program? Why did I give free reign to my curiosity? Why did I allow myself to engage in those wild sprees of desultory and promiscuous reading? Why did I not limit myself strictly to good books?” I’ve asked myself similar questions. I am the least systematic of readers. The only writers I have ever read sequentially, first work to last, are Shakespeare and Melville. I’m no scholar. I haven’t even read all of Henry James. The passage at the top is from the essay “On Reading Books: A Barbarian's Cogitations” by Alexander Gerschenkron, published in the Summer 1978 issue of The American Scholar. Gerschenkron (1904-78) was an American economic historian born in Odesa, Ukraine. He kept a reading list, logging all the titles he read, something I have never done. On his website, Art Garfunkel keeps a list of every book he has read since 1968, a practice that never tempted me. Much…