File:A child's guide to reading (1909) (14566091370).jpg

Identifier: childsguidetorea00macy (find matches)
Title: A child's guide to reading
Year: 1909 (1900s)
Authors: Macy, John Albert, 1877-1932
Subjects: Books and reading for children Children's literature
Publisher: New York : Baker & Taylor
Contributing Library: New York Public Library
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

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that hasinterested many readers, and then if it prove good,to try another by the same author. If a writer hasproduced two novels that interest you, it is safe toassume that he has written a third and a fourth.Some writers, it is true, have been distinguished fora single masterpiece. Don Quixote is the only bookof Cervantes that we are likely to care for. Robin-son Crusoe is all that most people have foimd goodin Defoes tales (though there is much merit in hisother stories). iSTo other book of Mrs. Stowes is evensecond to TJncle Toms Cabin. The Vicar ofWakefield is the glorious whole of Goldsmiths nar-rative prose, though he succeeded in every other formof literature, including the prose drama. But theman who can write two novels can write three if hehas time; the two-novel power is likely to be a ten-novel power with torpedo fleets of short stories andessays. Anyone who has liked Silas Marner and Middlemarch will not need to be urged to read Felix Holt, Adam Bede, Eomola, The Mill 68
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HAWTHORNE TliG Reading of Fiction on tlie Floss. The person who has once read andenjoyed two novels of Dickens is likely to read sixor eight, Pendennis leads to The ISTewcomes.And any of Trollopes Barchester, novels is anintroduction to the happily interminable series. I have purposely said little about the short story,because in this day of magazines we all read shortstories, some of them pretty good ones. There arefifty persons who can write one or two acceptableshort tales to one who can make a novel of mod-erate merit. And the great writers of the tale haveoften been novelists as well, so that if one beginsto read novels one will meet with the best shortstories which have been worth collecting into vol-umes. Readers of The House of Seven Gables and The Scarlet Letter will make the acquaintance ofHawthornes Twice Told Tales and Mosses froman Old Manse. Among modern fictionists of im-portance Poe stands almost alone as a writer of taleswho never tried the longer and greater form of

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