Contribution to a Questionnaire on Reading1

You ask me to name ‘ten good books’ for you, and refrain from adding to this any word of explanation. Thus you leave to me not only the choice of the books but also the interpretation of your request. Accustomed to paying attention to small signs, I must then trust the wording in which you couch your enigmatical demand. You did not say: ‘the ten most magnificent works (of world literature)’, in which case I should have been obliged to reply, with so many others: Homer, the tragedies of Sophocles, Goethe's Faust, Shakespeare's Hamlet, Macbeth, etc. Nor did you say the ‘ten most significant books’, among which scientific achievements like those of Copernicus, of the old physician Johann Weier on the belief in witches, Darwin's Descent of Man, and others, would then have found a place. You did not even ask for ‘favourite books’, among which I should not have forgotten Milton's Paradise Lost and Heine's Lazarus. I think, therefore, that a particular stress falls on the ‘good’ in your phrase, and that with this predicate you intend to designate books