Unit 3 On Reading

第一篇：Unit 3 On Reading

ON READING

W.Somerset Maugham

1.The first thing I want to insist on is that reading should be enjoyable.Of course, there are many books that we all have to read, either to pass examinations or to acquire information, from which it is impossible to extract enjoyment.We are reading them for instruction, and the best we can hope is that our need for it will enable us to get through them without tedium.Such books we read with resignation rather than with alacrity.But that is not the sort of reading I have in mind.The books I shall mention in due course will help you neither to get a degree nor to earn your living.They will not teach you to sail a boat or get a stalled motor to run, but they will help you to live more fully.That, however, they cannot do unless you enjoy reading them.2.The “you” I address is the adult whose avocations give him certain leisure and who would like to read the books which can without loss be left unread.I do not address the bookworm.He can find his own way.I wish to deal only with the masterpieces which the consensus of opinion for a long time has accepted as supreme.We are all supposed to have read them;it is a pity that so few of us have.But there are masterpieces which are acknowledged to be such by all the best critics and to which the historians of literature devote considerable space, yet which no ordinary person can now read with enjoyment.They are important to the students, but changing times and changing tastes have robbed them of their savour and it is hard to read them now without an effort of will.Let me give one instance: I have read George Eliot’s Adam Bede, but I cannot put my hand on my heart and say that was with pleasure.I read it from a sense of duty;I finished it with a sigh of relief.3.Now of such books as this I mean to say nothing.Every man is his own best critic.Whatever the learned say about a book, however unanimous they are in their praise of it, unless it interests you, it is no business of yours.Don’t forget that critics often make mistakes — the history of criticism is full of the blunders the most eminent of them have made, and you who read are the final judge of the value to you of the book you are reading.This, of course, applies to the books I am going to recommend to your attention.We are none of us exactly like everyone else, only rather like, and it would be unreasonable to suppose that the books that have meant a great deal to me should be precisely those that will mean a great deal to you.But they are books that I feel the richer for having read, and I think I should not be quite the man I am if I had not read them.And so I beg of you, if any of you who read these pages are tempted to read the books I suggest and cannot get on with them, just put them down;they will be of no service to you if you do not enjoy them.No one is under an obligation to read poetry or fiction or the miscellaneous literature which is classed as belles-lettres.(I wish I knew the English term for this, but I don’t think there is one.)He must read them for pleasure, and who can claim that what pleases one man must necessarily please another?

4.But let no one think that pleasure is immoral.Pleasure in itself is a great good, all pleasure, but its consequences may be such that the sensible person eschews certain varieties of it.Nor need pleasure be gross and sensual.They are wise in their generation who have discovered that intellectual pleasure is the most satisfying and the most enduring.It is well to acquire the habit of reading.To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the

miseries of life.Almost all, I say, for I would not go so far as to pretend that to read a book will assuage the pangs of hunger or still the pain of unrequited love;but half a dozen good detective stories and a hot-water bottle will enable anyone to snap his fingers at the worst cold in the head.But who is going to acquire the habit of reading for reading’s sake, if he is bidden to read books that bore him?

5.It is more convenient to take the books of which I am now going to speak in chronological order, but I can see no reason why, if you make up your mind to read them, you should do so in that order.I think you would be much better advised to read them according to your fancy;nor do I see even why you should read them one by one.For my own part, I find it more agreeable to read four or five books together.After all, you aren’t in the same mood on one day as on another, nor have you the same eagerness to read a certain book at all hours of the day.We must suit ourselves in these matters, and I have naturally adopted the plan that best suits me.In the morning before I start work I read for a while a book, either of science or philosophy, that requires a fresh and attentive brain.It sets me off for the day.Later on, when my work is done and I feel at ease, but not inclined for mental exercise of a strenuous character, I read history, essays, criticism or biography;and in the evening I read a novel.Besides these, I keep on hand a volume of poetry in case I feel in the mood for that, and by my bedside I have one of those books, too rarely to be found, alas, which you can dip into at any place and stop reading with equanimity at the end of any paragraph.6.Upon looking back on what I have written, I notice that I have more than once suggested to you that you would be wise now and then to skip.I think all the books I have mentioned are important enough to be read thoroughly, but even they are more enjoyable if you exercise your right to skip.Change of taste has rendered certain parts of even great works tedious.We no longer want to be bothered with the moral dissertations of which the eighteenth century was so fond, nor with the lengthy descriptions of scenery which were favoured in the nineteenth.When the novel became realistic authors fell in love with detail for its own sake, and it took them a long time to discover that detail is interesting only if it is relevant.To know how to skip is to know how to read with profit and pleasure, but how you are to learn it I cannot tell you, for it is a trick I have never acquired.I am a bad skipper;I am afraid of missing something that may be of value to me, and so will read pages that only weary me;when once I begin to skip, I cannot stop, and end the book dissatisfied with myself because I am aware I have not done it justice, and then I am apt to think that I might just as well never have read it at all.