在邮件里看到《纽约时报》的Breaking News: Doris Lessing, Outspoken Novelist Who Won 2007 Nobel Prize, Dies at 94，有点儿惊讶——我差不多忘了老太太是当代的——立刻想起了她的《金色笔记》，特别是在1971年引言里的一段话（中译本似乎删除了引言），是她对想研究她的作品的同学说的（我以前引用过，http://blog.sciencenet.cn/blog-279992-545279.html 现在重温一遍）：

Dear Student. You are mad. Why spend months and years writing thousands of words about one book, or even one writer, when there are hundreds of books waiting to be read. You don’t see that you are the victim of a pernicious system. And if you have yourself chosen my work as your subject, and if you do have to write a thesis — and believe me I am very grateful that what I’ve written is being found useful by you — then why don’t you read what I have written and make up your own mind about what you think, testing it against your own life, your own experience. Never mind about Professors White and Black.

这是说要写自己的东西；还有一段说，该读什么书，不该读什么书：

There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag -- and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty -- and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.

读吸引你的书，不要读你觉得应该读或者赶什么潮流的书。记住，二三十岁时烦你的书，将在你四五十岁时为你打开门户。还要在恰当的时候读恰当的书。

老太太2007年获诺贝尔文学奖