I entered high school having read hundreds of books. But I was not a good reader. Merely bookish, I lacked a point of view when I read. Rather, I read in order to get a point of view. I searched books for good expressions and sayings, pieces of information, ideas, themes—anything to enrich my thought and make me feel educated. When one of my teachers suggested to his sleepy tenth-grade English class that a person could not have a "complicated （复杂的） idea" until he had read at least two thousand books, I heard the words without recognizing either its irony （嘲讽） or its very complicated truth. I merely determined to make a list of all the books I had ever read. Strict with myself, I included only once a title I might have read several times. （ How, after all, could one read a book more than once?） And I included only those books over a hundred pages in length. （ Could anything shorter be a book?）
There was yet another high school list I made. One day I came across a newspaper article about an English professor at a nearby state college. The article had a list of the "hundred most important books of Western Civilization. " "More than anything else in my life," the professor told the reporter with finality , " these books have made me all that I am . " That was the kind of words I couldn’t ignore （忽视）. I kept the list for the several months it took me to read all of the titles. Most books, of course, I hardly understood. While reading Plato's The Republic, for example, I needed to keep looking at the introduction of the book to remind myself what the text was about. However, with the special patience and superstition （迷信） of a schoolboy, I looked at every word of the text. And by me time I reached the last word, pleased, I persuaded myself that I had read The Republic, and seriously crossed Plato off my list.

在进入高中以前，我曾读过上百本书籍。但是我并不是一个优秀的阅读者。我只是一个书虫，因为在我看书的时候，我往往缺少自己的想法，而只是试图从书中去寻求一种观点或想法。. 我在书中搜索一切能丰富我的思想，能提升我教育背景的知识，比如：流畅的表达方式和各种名人名言，各种信息、观点与思想等。在10年级的英语课堂上，我的一个老师面对昏昏欲睡学生们，说:”只有当一个人读了至少2000本书的时候，他才可能产生有深度的想法。我听着他的话，不知道那句话是嘲讽，还是另有深意。 我只是暗下决心要把我所读过的所有书目列一张清单。我想尽办法要把请单列的长一些。我把那些可能只读过几遍书名的书写了上去（没有人会把书读上几遍的），还有那些只有100页的书我也写在了清单上（大概不会有比这更短小的书籍了）。.在高中时期，我还有另一张清单。.一天，我从报纸上读到了一篇关于附近一个州立学院英语教授的文章。文中列出了“西方文明史上最重要的100本书”。那位教授告诉记者， “这些书在造就了今天的我，这是起他任何东西都无法比拟的。”这句话深深印在我脑海中。我把清单保留了几个月并熟悉了上面所有的书名。当然，大多数书我都不能理解。比如在读柏拉图的共和国时，我需要不断查看前言介绍，以提示自己这本书的主要内容。然而凭借着我惊人的耐心，以及对当时报上登载的那位教授的信奉，我逐字逐句的把文章读了下来。当我读到最后一个字的时候，我高兴地告诉自己，我已经把《共和国》这本书看 完了。并郑重的把柏拉图从我的清单上划去。