Gilbert Norwood有篇趣文，题曰Too Many Books（见陆谷孙先生选编的《20篇英美现代散文》）——自文艺复兴以来，好书太多了（不说坏书），我们被书埋了，憋死了（We are oppressed, choked, buried by books）。

人们都说萨福的诗好，都是玫瑰，可惜太少——可假如玫瑰多了，满大街都是，公交车上是，电线杆上也是，连楼梯和报纸里也是，会怎么样呢？我们就该把它当四害大扫除了。

It was a famous, almost a proverbial, remark that Sappho’s poems were "few, but roses." What should we say if we found roses on every table, rose-trees along the streets, if our tramcars and lamp-posts were festooned with roses, if roses littered every staircase and dropped from the folds of every newspaper? In a week we should be organising a "campaign" against them as if they were rats or house-flies.

如果不把9/10的书都烧了（作者感谢凯撒，我们应该感谢嬴政了），我们还有几种读书的策略：

第一种：“我没时间。”

第二种：读自己感觉能读的，找理由把其他书给否定了。如果别人问“吴尔芙怎么样？”，他会说，“我恐怕过时了，现代人的东西不和我一路。我读菲尔丁和奥斯丁就够了。”（I fear I am an old fogey. These modern people seem to me to have lost their way. Fielding and Jane Austen are good enough for me.）

第三种：把《泰晤士报文学副刊》（Times Literary Supplement）里的东西都拿来读，生怕比别人读少了——聊天的时候会觉得好没面子。

第四种：宣扬“精英主义”（Cream Theory）,读“古今最好的书”。从英国读到但丁、歌德、托尔斯泰、拉辛、易卜生、塞万提斯、维吉尔、荷马（可惜没有中国人的名字）……这种读者令人尊敬，却不够聪明；他们大错了，因为并不是每个人都能从大作家那儿得到好处的（it is an error to suppose that because an author has by the world in general been placed upon a pinnacle, every reader can derive much good from him）。

根据量子论的原则，我们每个人其实都是这几种读者的叠加。只有在面对一个作者、一本书，或处在一定的场合时，才“坍缩”为其中的某一类。这会儿，我是第一种人，没时间读书了。

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