Very few books are always worthy of the attention of the true reader. Such books are called classical.

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Classics are the best, most magnificent books created over the centuries. People learn from these books, everyone knows them. This is the golden fund of culture. Not knowing a classic book is always a little embarrassing, and some people, even if they haven't read a classic book, won't admit it. They say: "I have read, of course, I have read..." – but they themselves are very ashamed at this moment, as if they were caught in a bad deed. But it is true: not to read the best books of mankind is not a bad deed?

It is said that a person can read about four thousand books in a lifetime. This is a lot. If they were all in the apartment, people would say: "The whole house is covered with books!" In the district village library there are usually eight to ten thousand books, in the library of the city school forty to fifty thousand, but among them there are many that are not worth reading, without which you can live.

And there are not so many books without which it is impossible to live, truly classic books of world literature: two or three hundred, depending on how you count. For example, in order to get acquainted with the main works of the Russian classics of the nineteenth century, one must read four volumes of Pushkin, three volumes of Gogol, three or four volumes of Turgenev, four or five volumes of Dostoevsky, one volume of Chernyshevsky, five or six volumes of Tolstoy, one volume of Nekrasov, four or five volumes of Chekhov — about thirty books in all. Is it really that much? If you read only one volume a month and start serious reading from the fifth or sixth grade (and this is how they usually start), then it turns out that the list can be significantly expanded. And it turns out that it is not at all difficult to read two or three hundred books of the main circle of Russian and world classical literature before graduating from school. By the age of seventeen or eighteen, a normal developed person usually finishes reading the main books; for another five years he "gets" what he missed, and then for the rest of his life...

Then all his life he reads these books again and again in order to keep them in his memory, in his soul. Classic books differ in that they can be reread all your life, although their content is known. Moreover, with each new reading, they give a new pleasure, a new joy, incomparable with the joy of the first reading. Actually, the reader is not the one who reads. The reader is the one who rereads. Gradually, these best, classic books fill our spiritual world, and only from this time do we begin to approach what is called a "cultured person." To graduate from school and not read the main classical books by this time, not to love them, not to reread them means to deceive both yourself and the people around you: everyone will think that you have a secondary education, but you do not have it, you only have a first certificate, but not an education. There is no education without reading classic books.

The life of a serious, cultured reader goes in "waves". It's strange to ask him: "Who is your favorite writer?" Today it is Tolstoy, and tomorrow it will be Kuprin, suddenly you want to reread it, and two years later - Goethe, and three years later - Thomas Mann, and then - Pushkin... A person changes, his interests change, but he can always find something important and necessary in the boundless (by thought boundless, and not by the number of books!) treasury of world literature. He will always find what he cannot live without today.

But, of course, reading strictly according to the plan is the same as living strictly according to the regime: not everyone succeeds and... It's a bit boring.

There should also be a certain freedom in reading. A plan is a plan, the main channel, and around it there are countless distractions: new books, books that accidentally interested, as well as novels, stories, poems from literary magazines.

Such freedom of reading is necessary. There are books that are simply entertaining, you read them carelessly, by the way, when you are tired; There are popular science books, they are called "siege weapons" for storming serious scientific books.

But even being distracted, but also occupying ourselves with not so serious and important reading, let us constantly keep in mind the main channel – classical literature, and follow this channel.

Whether you are a physicist, a chemist, a turner, a baker, a devil or the devil, it is impossible to live a serious life without reading and rereading two or three hundred books of classical literature. For those who are going to become the devil and fool the human race, these books are especially necessary: without them you will not know the psychology of man.

Books will teach the future man to be a man.

A future woman will be taught to be a woman.