Carol drove through an astonishing number of books from the public library and from city shops. Kennicott was at first uncomfortable over her disconcerting habit of buying them. A book was a book and if you had several thousand of them right here in the library, free, why the dickens should you spend your good money? After worrying about it for two or three years, he decided that this was one of the Funny Ideas which she had caught as a librarian and from whch she would never entirely recover.
The authors whom she read were most of them frightfully annoyed by the Vida Sherwins. They were young American sociologists, young English realists, Russian horrorists; Anatole France, Rolland, Nexo, Wells, Shaw, Key, Edgar Lee Masters, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Henry Mencken, and all the other subversive philosophers and artists whom women were consulting everywhere, in batik-curtained studios in New York, in Kansas farmhouses, San Francisco drawing-rooms, Alabama schools for negroes. From then she got the same confused desire which the million other women felt; the same determination to be class-conscious without discovering the class of which she was to be conscious.
"I went to a private suburban high school. I was not conspicuously good or bad at sports, neither brilliant nor backward in studies. I had a definite blind spot for mathematics or anything mechanical. I never liked competitive team games and avoided these whenever possible. I became, in fact, a chronic malingerer. I did like fishing, hunting and hiking. I read more than was usual for an American boy of that time and place: Oscar Wilde, Anatole France, Baudelaire, even Gide. I formed a romantic attachment for another boy and we spent our Saturdays exploring old quarries, riding around on bicycles and fishing in ponds and rivers."
"I have no clear picture of E----'s habits and preferences in regard to literature. I do not know how complete or representative is the following randomly ordered list of authors he liked: Heine, Anatole France, Balzac, Dostoyevski (The Brothers Karamazov), Musil, Dickens, Lagerlof, Tolstoi (folk stories), Kazantzakis, Brecht (Galilei), Broch (The Death of Virgil), Gandhi (autobiography), Gorki, Hersey (A Bell for Adano), van Loon (Life and Times of Rembrandt), Reik (Listening with the Third Ear)."