We can easily and cheaply get all the wisdom of the ages, all the stories that have delighted(使快乐) mankind for centuries, but we must know how to use this treasure and how to get the most from it. The most unfortunate people all over the world are those who have never discovered how satisfying it is to read good books.
I am very interested in people, in meeting them and finding about them. I've found in books new friends, new societies, and new words. Reading is a pleasure of mind. It is a little like a sport: Your eagerness for knowledge and quickness make you a good reader. 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. Wherever you start reading you connect yourself with one of the families of ideas, and finally 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 "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.
