Page 45 - English Grammar - IX-X

IV. Read the following passage carefully.

READING FOR LIFEFOR LIFE
READING
(1) Once upon a time in the dead of winter, former US President Theodore Roosevelt took
off in a makeshift boat down the little Missouri River in pursuit of thieves who had
stolen his prized rowboat. After several days, he caught up and got the law on them
with his trusty rifle, at which point they surrendered. Then Roosevelt set off to haul
the thieves cross-country to justice. They headed across the snow-covered wastes to
the jail, and Roosevelt walked the entire 65 kilometres or so—an astonishing feat.
But what makes it especially memorable is that during that time he managed to read
Anna Karenina.

(2) I often think of that when I hear people say they haven’t time to read. Reportedly,
the average person does have time to watch TV, about four hours a day. The average
person, I’m told, reads at the rate of 250 words per minute. So, based on these
statistics, he or she could, in a week, read the complete poems of T.S. Eliot, two
Thornton Wilder plays, the complete poems of Maya Angelou, Faulkner’s ‘The Sound
and the Fury’, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘The Great Gatsby’, and the ‘Book of Psalms’.

(3) But a week is a long time by today’s standards, when information is available at the
touch of a finger. We’re being sold the idea that information is learning, and we’re
being sold a bill of goods. Knowing the area of a state or the jumping capacity of a flea
may be useful, but it isn’t exactly learning. The greatest of all avenues to learning–to
wisdom, adventure, pleasure, insight, to understanding human nature, understanding
ourselves and our world, and our place in it–is reading books.
(4) Reading for life, all your life. Nothing ever invented provided such sustenance, such
infinite rewards for time spent, as a good book. Read to your heart’s content. Let one
book lead to another. They nearly always do.

(5) Take up a great author and read everything he or she has written. Read about places
you’ve never been to. Read books that changed history: Tom Paine’s ‘Common Sense’,
the autobiography of Gandhiji, Rachel Carson’s ‘Silent Spring’.

(6) Read those books you know you’re supposed to have read and imagine as dreary. A
classic may be defined as a book that stays long in print, and a book stays long in print
only because it is exceptional. Why exclude the exceptional from your experience?
And when you read a book you love, a book you feel has enlarged the experience of
being alive, a book that “lit the fire”—then spread the word.

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