TSL Texas
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TSL Book Club
"I find reading a great comfort. People often say to me that they do not see how I find time for it, to which I answer them (much more truthfully than they believe) that to me it is a dissipation, which I have sometimes to try to avoid, instead of an irksome duty."
~ Teddy Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt is known to have speed-read his way through up to three books per day. He wrote about reading in his autobiography, including his preferred authors, and advised all readers.
Meeting Date/Times: Every other Thursday (when the schedule is set). The discussion leader sets the times, which are in the book selection post below.
Meeting Location: Zoom (email guide@tsltexas.com for details.)​
Discussion Format: The discussion leader will moderate the discussion. Some leaders are more structured, whereas others are more organic with their flow.​
Attendance: TSL Book Club is open to all TSL members. Attendance is voluntary. Do not let being behind in reading prevent you from attending.​
Do you have a recommendation? If you would like to recommend a book for future discussion, please let us know here.
Previous Selections
“I am a part of everything that I have read.”
― Theodore Roosevelt
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1. “The room for choice is so limitless that to my mind it seems absurd to try to make catalogues which shall be supposed to appeal to all the best thinkers. This is why I have no sympathy whatever with writing lists of the One Hundred Best Books, or the Five-Foot Library [a reference to the Harvard Classics]. It is all right for a man to amuse himself by composing a list of a hundred very good books… But there is no such thing as a hundred books that are best for all men, or for the majority of men, or for one man at all times.”
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2. “A book must be interesting to the particular reader at that particular time.”
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3. “Personally, the books by which I have profited infinitely more than by any others have been those in which profit was a by-product of the pleasure; that is, I read them because I enjoyed them, because I liked reading them, and the profit came in as part of the enjoyment.”
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4. “The reader, the booklover, must meet his own needs without paying too much attention to what his neighbors say those needs should be.”
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5. “He must not hypocritically pretend to like what he does not like.”
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6. “Books are almost as individual as friends. There is no earthly use in laying down general laws about them. Some meet the needs of one person, and some of another; and each person should beware of the booklover’s besetting sin, of what Mr. Edgar Allan Poe calls ‘the mad pride of intellectuality,’ taking the shape of arrogant pity for the man who does not like the same kind of books.”
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7. “Now and then I am asked as to ‘what books a statesman should read,’ and my answer is, poetry and novels – including short stories under the head of novels.”
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8. ”Ours is in no sense a collector’s library. Each book was procured because some one of the family wished to read it. We could never afford to take overmuch thought for the outsides of books; we were too much interested in their insides.”
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9. “[We] all need more than anything else to know human nature, to know the needs of the human soul; and they will find this nature and these needs set forth as nowhere else by the great imaginative writers, whether of prose or of poetry.”
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10. “Books are all very well in their way, and we love them at Sagamore Hill; but children are better than books.”
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Source: https://fs.blog/roosevelt-rules-for-reading/
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