# St. Nicholas/Volume 32/Number 5/Books and Reading

Books and Reading
Traveling Companions
The Power of Time
Time.” It was meant to show that even a second might make all the difference between safety and disaster. There was one striking paragraph beginning, “A train comes rushing around a curve,” and ending, “and all because the engineer’s watch was behind time!” But all this was about punctuality, the value of time. There is another matter worth your thought, quite as much as promptness and economy of minutes. The economy of saving time is wise, but there is an economy of spending time.
In reading, especially, hurry is most wasteful. Reading is the making of thoughts, of ideas, of pictures in the brain. All young photographers know how little is to be made out of an “under-exposed plate,” but do they understand that there may be such a thing as an under-exposed brain? It takes time to make impressions on the mind. If you read too fast, either aloud or to yourself, or skim over your reading, the mind receives poor impressions or none at all.
Story-poems
New Books Worth While.
The Works of Cooper.
Won't some of our older friends tell the juniors the names of books that pleased their girlhood or boyhood?—such as “Author:James Greenwood|The Adventures of Reuben Davidger]],” or “Ran Away to Sea,” or “The Life-boat,” or “Gascoyne, the Sandalwood Trader,” They are too good to be forgotten.
Helps to Right Reading
The Lives of Great Men
It is an old saying that truth is stranger than fiction—so old that we forget its wisdom; but compare the rise of the young Corsican lieutenant, Napoleon Buonaparte, from obscurity to an imperial throne with the most improbable story for young folks, and the truth seems more improbable than fiction. The life of Mahomet by Irving is as strange; and these are only the best known.
There is no need to go outside of history for thrilling stories. Did you ever read of Captain Tyson's drift on the ice-floe, or of the beginning of the Russian dynasty of the Romanoffs? You may choose your own sort of adventure, and history will supply you with the most wonderful examples of it.
Mutual Mentors
Letters used to carry news, but the news now is old before a letter can arrive, Besides, if you care about each other’s opinion, each can be a check upon her friend to prevent the reading of too many frivolous books or to encourage the reading of those worth while; and it also helps to a knowledge of good books.
The Fencer John Milton
While at Cambridge he made himself an accomplished swordsman, and declared with the modesty that is characteristic of great men that he was quite able to protect himself from harm when he had sword in hand. It is pleasant to picture him engaged in a fencing bout, and to read of his confidence in his sword: “Armed with it, as he generally was, he was in the habit of thinking himself quite a match for any one, even were he much the more robust, and of being perfectly at his ease as to the danger of any injury that any one could offer him, man ta man,”
Reading about English History.
The same friend also wishes us to recommend highly Kenneth Grahame's books to our young readers, but for books so well known as these we hardly think that this is necessary. Neither do we advise the reading of them at too early an age, since, while they are about children, by their method of treatment they are aimed mainly at older readers.