All the wisdom of the ages, all the stories that have delighted mankind for centuries, are easily and cheaply available to all of us within the covers of books, but we must know how to avail ourselves of this treasure and how to get the most from it. The most unfortunate people in the world are those who have never discovered how satisfying it is to read good books. I am most interested in people, in them and finding out about them. Some of the most remarkable people met existed only in a writer’s imagination, then on the pages of his book, and then, again, in my imagination. I’ve found in books new friends, new societies and new words. If I am interested in people, others are interested not so much in “who” as in “how”. “Who” in the books includes everybody from science-fiction superman 200 centuries in the future all the way back to the first figures in history.
“How” covers everything from the ingenious explanations of Sherlock Holmes to the discoveries of science and ways of teaching manners to children.Readingis pleasure of the mind, which means that it is a little like a sport: your eagerness and knowledge and quickness make you a good reader.Readingis fun, not because the writer is telling you something, but because it makes your mind work. Your own imagination works along with the author’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, together they all add up to something. They are connected with each other and with other cities.
