Read for life
By David Marcolo
Read for life, all your life. Nothing ever invented provides suchsubstance, such infinite reward for time spent, as a good book. Readto your heart’s content. Let one book lead to another. They nearlyalways 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 changedhistory: Tom Paine’s Commom Sense, the autobiography of FrederickDouglass, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.
Read these books you know you are supposed to have read andimagine as dreary. A classic may be defined as a book that stayslong in print, and a book stays long in print only because it isexceptional. Why exclude the exceptional from your experience? Andwhen you read a book you love—the book you feel has enlarged theexperience of being alive, a book that “lights the fire”—then spreadthe world.
To carry a book with you wherever you go is old advice and goodadvice. John Adams urged his son John Quincy to carry a volume ofportry. “You will never be alone,” he said, “with a poet in yourpocket.” |