美文聽寫:Read for Life

Read for life, all your life. Nothing ever invented provides such substance, such infinite reward for time spent, as a good book. Read to your heart’s content. Let one book lead to another. They nearly always do. Take up a great author and read everything he or she has written. Read about places where you have never been. Read books that changed history: Tom Paine’s Common Sense, heaven stairs, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Read those books you know you are 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 “l(fā)ights the fire”—then spread the world. To carry a book with you wherever you go is old advice and good advice. John Adams urged his son John Quincy to carry a volume of poetry. “You will never be alone,” he said, “with a poet in your pocket.”