The Reading Course, 1912–13

The Reading Course, 1912-13 Dr. George H. Brimhall, chairman of the Library and Reading Course Committee, said of the present year's reading course, at the June convention: "It has been suggested that I refer to the Reading Course. I have been very much interested in that, because I know that if your child hasn't any better place to play he will play in the mud on the street. I know if a man's mind is not properly directed into good fields, it will get into bad fields. We have selected as our reading course, this year, six books. Three of these books are educational, and should be studied. They are text books of a character requiring what we might call work — a little brain work. The first one of these is Where One-half of the World is Waking Up, which treats of conditions in China and the Orient, in order that we may become able to think and talk rationally about that country; and the next is Mexican Trails, which treats of conditions in Mexico, so that a man may know something about Mexico, that the opinion he may express may have some little background. Then there is From River to Ocean, another book which is good reading to me. I started on it, and I read it right through. My fourteenyear-old boy had read it, and he wasn't more interested in it than I was. It treats of the sweep of civilzation by the fur-man, by the miner, by the great educator and the agriculturist, the great road-builders and desert-redeemers. And then we have the others, restful books, the recreative, The Winning of Barbara Worth, a bit of fiction which is calculated to inspire a general desire to do things, and perhaps a special desire to win things out of mother earth, to redeem the earth. That book, I will say, has had six hundred thousand readers in its career. It is quite a new book, too. There are some things in it that we would rather were different, but we cannot get a book that is just what we

MUTUAL WORK. 859 want. Then we have the Piney Ridge Cottage, written by Brother Nephi Anderson. That is a very instructive and inspiring love story of a country girl in Utah. Then we have Metta, by Alfred Lambourne. This is a story that was printed in a series of articles in the Contributor, years ago, good literature that a man would be better by reading. That constitutes our course this year.