SELECTING A NOVEL.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 3185, 10 May 1909, Page 4

SELECTING A NOVEL.

"It is pathetic, sometimes, to see how psople choose novels," remarked j Dr. Waddell in the course of an address on novel-reading given to the St. Andrew's Debating Society at Dunedin. "Go down to the Athenaeum," he continued, "and watch people coming to select a novel. They have no conception at all — seven-eighths of them —of who is a good writer and who is a bad writer. They take up a book, turn over the pages, and glance at it. If there's an illustration in it that attracts them, then they think they will take the book, and they go home with a book about which they know nothing whatever." The doctor went on to compare this to the action of a person who should go into a chemist's shop and mix himself a physic out of ail the bottles that attracted him, on the shelves. "It is bad enough," he said, "to poison your body, but it is an irretrievable disaster to poison the mind and the soul; and the novels which tend to do that crowd our bookshops and fill the shelves of our public-libraries, and find their way into homes."