But I am assigning too many motives of self-improvement
to reading. People read for fun, for pleasure. The literature
of the Southwest affords bully reading.

"If I had read as much as other men, I would know as
little," Thomas Hobbes is credited with having said. A student
in the presence of Bishop E. D. Mouzon was telling
about the scores and scores of books he had read. At a pause
the bishop shook his long, wise head and remarked, "My son,
when DO you get time to think?" Two of the best educated
men I have ever had the fortune of talking with were neither
schooled nor widely read. They were extraordinary observers.
One was a plainsman, Charles Goodnight; the other was a
borderer, Don Alberto Guajardo, in part educated by an old
Lipan Indian.

But here are the books. I list them not so much to give
knowledge as to direct people with intellectual curiosity and
with interest in their own land to the sources of knowledge;
not to create life directly, but to point out where it has
been created or copied. On some of the books I have made
brief observations. Those observations can never be nearly
so important to a reader as the development of his own
powers of observation. With something of an apologetic
feeling I confess that I have read, in my way, most of the
books. I should probably have been a wiser and better
informed man had I spent more time out with the grasshoppers,
horned toads, and coyotes.
November 5, 1942 J. FRANK DOBIE