读书·乐趣篇

读书·乐趣篇

Companionship of Books

by Samuel Smiles^[22]

Ladies and Gentlemen, good morning!

A man may usually be known by the books he reads as well as by the company he keeps; for there is a companionship of books as well as of men; and one should always live in the best company, whether it be of books or of men.

A good book may be among the best of friends. It is the same today that it always was, and it will never change. It is the most patient and cheerful of companions. It does not turn its back upon us in times of adversity or distress. It always receives us with the same kindness; amusing and instructing us in youth, and comforting and comforting and consoling us in age.

Men often discover their affinity to each other by the love they have each for a book just as two persons sometimes discover a friend by the admiration which both have for a third. There is an old proverb, “Love me, love my dog,” but there is more wisdom is this: “Love me, love my book.” The book is a truer and higher bond^[23] of union. Men can think, feel, and sympathize with each other through their favorite author. They live in him together, and he in them.

“Books,” said Haslett, “wind in the heart; the poet’s verse slides in the current of our blood. We read them when young, we remember them when old. We feel that it has happened to ourselves. They are to be had very cheap and good. We breathe but the air of books.”

A good book is often the best urn of a life enshrining^[24] the best that life could think out; for the world of a man’ s life is, for the most part, but the world of his thoughts. Thus the best books are treasuries of good words, the golden thoughts, which, remembered and cherished, become our constant companions.“They are never alone,” said Sir Philip Sidney, “that are accompanied by noble thoughts.”

Books introduce us into the best society; they bring us into the presence of the greatest minds that have ever lived. We hear what they said and did; we see them as if they were really alive; we sympathize with them, enjoy with them, grieve with them; their experience becomes ours, and we feel as if we were in measure actors with them in the scenes which they describe.

The great and good do not die even in this world, embalmed in books, their spirits walk abroad. The book is a living voice. It is an intellect to which one still listens. Hence we ever remain under the influence of the great men of old. The imperial intellects of the world are as much alive now as they were ages ago.

[点评] 该演讲稿巧妙地引用名言警句作为文章的开端，说明读书不仅能给人们带来知识，还可以给人们带来乐趣。文中引用一些谚语和名人名言，使演讲稿更加生动。如：“Love me, love my dog.” “They are never alone, that are accompanied by noble thoughts.” 全文紧扣题目，内容丰富，恰当地应用拟人的写作手法，把书当作人类的朋友，形象生动，惟妙惟肖。

The Pleasure of Reading

Ladies and Gentlemen, good morning!

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^[25] 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 I’ve 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 worlds. 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 two hundred 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?

Reading is 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, 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 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. The same ideas, or related ones, turn up in different places; the human problems that repeat themselves in life repeat themselves in literature, but with different solutions according to different writings at different times. Books influence each other; they link the past, the present and the future and have their own generations, like families, wherever you start reading, you connect yourself with one of the families of ideas, and in the long run, 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 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 have suffered during the process.

Thank you！

[点评] 作者由衷地感叹 “读书确实能够带来乐趣”。读书不仅能带给我们心灵的愉悦，知识的增长，也能让我们在读书知天下的同时，启迪我们对做人的思考。文章立意深刻，文字朴实真挚。