All the wisdom of the times, all the stories that have delighted mankind for centuries, are easily and cheaply available to all of us in books, but we must know how to make use of this treasure. The unluckiest people in the world are those who have never discovered how satisfying it is to read good books.
I’m very interested in people and finding out about them. Some of the most amazing people I’ve met could only be found in a writer’s imagination, then in his book, and then, again, in my imagination. I’ve found in books new friends and new worlds.
Reading is fun, not because the writer is telling you something, but because it makes your mind work. Your own imagination works along with the writer’s or even goes beyond his. Your experience, compared with his, brings you to the same or different conclusions, and your ideas develop as you understand his.
Every book stands by itself, like a one-family house, but books in a library are like houses in a city. Although they are separate(分開的), in some way they are connected with each other. The same ideas, or related(相關的) ones, appear in different places; the human problems that repeat themselves in life repeat themselves in books, but with different solutions(解決方法) according to different writings at different times. Books influence each other. They connect the past, the present and the future and have their own generations (age groups), like families. Wherever you start reading, you connect yourself with one of the families of ideas, and in the end, you not only find out about the world and the people in it, you find out about yourself, too.
Reading can only be fun if you expect it to be. If you concentrate on(專注于) books somebody tells you “ought” to read, you probably won’ t have fun. But if you put down a book you don’t like and try another till you find one that means something to you, and then relax with it, you will almost certainly have a good time — and if you become, as a result of reading, better, wiser, kinder, or more gentle, you won’t suffer during the process.
小題1:Which of the following ideas may the writer of this article agree with?
| A．You will never meet amazing people in your life unless you read. |
| B．You think actively instead of getting facts passively（被動地）when reading. |
| C．You will get much delight from any book that you are told to read. |
| D．You can relax yourself by reading because it involves little thinking. |
小題2:What can we learn from Paragraph 4?
| A．We can often find something connected with ourselves in books. |
| B．Different writings at different times share the same characteristics. |
| C．The same problems will appear in different books with similar solutions. |
| D．Reading books which are written for your generation is more helpful to you. |
小題3:What’s the writer’s purpose of writing this article?
| A．To advise us to enjoy ourselves by reading. |
| B．To encourage us to make full use of libraries. |
| C．To encourage us to find out solutions in books. |
| D．To advise us to discuss books with other people. |
