Do you try to keep up with all the latest books? Why? Do you read simply to say that you have read, to be able to give expression to the usual fashionable gabble on so-called "current literature"? It is not the amount you read, but the amount of good, ennobling, and uplifting influences that you gain from your reading that makes reading worth while. No person that lives can read book after book in rapid succession and absorb therefrom anything worth while. As well sit down and eat from six o'clock in the morning until twelve o'clock at night and expect the body to be healthful as to read continually and expect the mind to be healthful. It is not eating but assimilation that builds up the body. Just so, it is not reading but mental absorption that informs the mind and strengthens the soul. One book a year, thoroughly mastered, out of which you have absorbed helpful, stimulating, invigorating, health-giving, power-producing thought and action is worth more than a thousand books swallowed whole without thought or digestion. Joaquin Miller says that "Books are for people who do not think." Very often this is a correct statement. While it is a good thing to desire the knowledge we can gain from books, it becomes an evil thing when we gain all of our knowledge of the world around us in this fashion. If the only thoughts we have are the thoughts we get from books, books are an injury instead of a blessing; a crutch instead of an invigoration. In his early life, Edwin Markham, the poet, had but three books, the Bible, Shakspere, and Bunyan. Yet from these three books and the contemporaneous study of the mountains, valleys, canyons, plains, orchards, gardens, ocean, sea-beach, and valleys by which he was surrounded, he absorbed thoughts and saw things that enabled him to write poems that have thrilled and benefited the world. Sir John Lubbock a few years ago chose from all the millions of books that have been published one hundred which he claims comprises all the best literature of all the ages, and more recently still, President Eliot of Harvard compressed upon a five-foot shelf all the books that he deems necessary for the really thoughtful man to possess.