[00:05.17]053. The Pleasure of Reading [00:11.45]All the wisdom of the ages, all the stories that have delighted mankind for centuries, [00:16.98]are easily and cheaply available to all of us within the covers of books [00:21.72]but we must know how to avail ourselves of this treasure and how to get the most from it. [00:27.71]The most unfortunate people in the world are those who have never discovered how satisfying it is to read good books. [00:35.25]I am most interested in people, in them and finding out about them. [00:40.51]Some of the most remarkable people I’ve met existed only in a writer’s imagination, [00:45.76]then on the pages of his book, and then, again, in my imagination. [00:51.37]I’ve found in books new friends, new societies, new words. [00:56.74]If I am interested in people, others are interested not so much in who as in how. [01:03.57]Who in the books includes everybody from science fiction superman two hundred centuries [01:09.44]in the future all the way back to the first figures in history. [01:14.97]How covers everything from the ingenious explanations of Sherlock Holmes [01:19.97]to the discoveries of science and ways of teaching manner to children. [01:25.38]Reading is pleasure of the mind, which means that it is a little like a sport: [01:31.30]your eagerness and knowledge and quickness make you a good reader. Reading is fun, [01:37.23]not because the writer is telling you something, but because it makes your mind work. [01:43.26]Your own imagination works along with the author’s or even goes beyond his. [01:49.25]Your experience, compared with his, brings you to the same or different conclusions, [01:55.14]and your ideas develop as you understand his. [01:59.63]Every book stands by itself, like a one-family house, [02:04.21]but books in a library are like houses in a city. Although they are separate, [02:09.70]together they all add up to something, they are connected with each other and with other cities. [02:16.78]The same ideas, or related ones, turn up in different places; [02:21.79]the human problems that repeat themselves in life repeat themselves in literature, [02:27.12]but with different solutions according to different writings at different times. [02:32.55]Books influence each other; they link the past, the present and the future and have their own generations, [02:39.54]like families. Wherever you start reading you connect yourself with one of the families of ideas, and in the long run, [02:47.54]you not only find out about the world and the people in it; you find out about yourself, too. [02:54.58]Reading can only be fun if you expect it to be. If you concentrate on books somebody tells you you “ought” to read, [03:02.05]you probably won’t have fun. But if you put down a book you don’t like and try another [03:07.90]till you find one that means something to you, and then relax with it, you will almost certainly have a good time - [03:15.57]and if you become, as a result of reading, better, wiser, kinder, or more gentle, you won’t have suffered during the process.

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