The Great Books
This chapter was originally intended to instroduce the recommended great books that were listed in the Appendix. To be honest，I don't like and I don't understand may be because of the history and culture and the styles of writers are different.
The some criterion about wheather books are truely great，for example，how these books take part in a great conversation－how they are interwoven in our thought.
Reading great books without its help is an intellectural experience hardly to be equalled in the world of thought. But reading them with as a guide is even more rewarding.
the selection of “best books”
Until this chapter，the author has introduced many rules of reading and some qualities which the great nooks process so in this chapter the writer want to bring together in one place all the signs by which the great books can be recongnized－repeating some，adding new ones. The following are the signs which everyone uses in making lists or selections.
The great books were those everybody recommends and nobody reads or those everyone says he intends to read and never does.
The great boos are popular not pedantic.（卖弄学问的，学究式的）
The great books are always contemporary.（同时代的）
The great books are the most readable.
The great books are the most instructive and the most enlightening.
The great books deal with the persistently unsolved problems of human life.
Now these six criteria hang together，how they follow from and support one another. We can see why，if these are the qualifications，the exclusive society of great authors has fewer than four hundred members.
All we have to do is to follow the lead，and the trail will unwind by itself.
前人栽树，后人乘凉 站在巨人的肩膀上
First because they were readers as well，lead us to the books which influenced them. They are using ideas whose more extended and disinterested exposition is to be found elsewhere. Second the trail leads further.The writers of the eighteenth century had been unfluenced in return by their immediate forebears in political thought.
If we wish to use one great book to help us read another，it would be better to read from the past into the present，rather than the other way around.
