谈读书（2）
读书是一件人让赏心悦目的事，再没有比读书能让人感到轻松愉快的事了，它能使你抛却烦恼，享受快乐。更重要的是，只有读书才会使我们拥有像爱默生般“哲学家的深邃、宗教家的虔敬、演说家的**及诗人的睿智和美”。
On Reading
W. Somerset Maugham
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 ex***nations 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 alacrity1. 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 themselves.
The “you” I address is the adult whose avocations give him a certain leisure and who would like to read the books which cannot without loss be left unread. I do not address the bookworm. He can find his own way. His curiosity leads him along many unfrequented paths and he gathers delight in the discovery of half-forgotten excellence. 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 student, 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 it was with pleasure. I read it from a sense of duty: I finished it with a sigh of relief.
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 unanimotis2 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 fun 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.