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 idea" until he had read at least two thousand books, I heard the words without recognizing either its irony 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(firmly), "these books have made me all that I am." That was the kind of words I couldn't ignore. 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 of a schoolboy, I looked at every word of the text. And by the time I reached the last word, pleased, I persuaded myself that I had read The Republic, and seriously crossed Plato off my list On hearing the teacher's suggestion of reading, the writer thought   _  .
one must read as many books as possible a student should not have a complicated idea it was impossible for one to read two thousand books students ought to make a list of the books they had read