ON READING G303

 ON READING

The Authors' Club

London, S. W.1

2nd January, 19_

Dear Francisco,

I'm glad to know you enjoyed the books I sent you for Christmas. Your letter of thanks was very well written and I congratulate you on being able to write so well.

You ask me for advice on reading. That's a very difficult request. I always hesitate to advise my friends on what to read. How can I possibly know what will interest other people? And you don't say in your letter what you want to read.

What you do say is that you're very fond of reading, and I'm delighted by that. Do you know the essays of Francis Bacon, who lived about the same time as Shakespeare? They're full of good advice about reading. Here is a bit from the essay “Of Studies.”

“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.”

I can't give you better advice than that. It tells you how to read books of different kinds. I suppose most travel books are “to be tasted”; it's enough to dip into them and read bits here and there. If you're fond of stories, you will, if you're like me, read them quickly; you'll “swallow” them. And then there are books that you'll read slowly and carefully. If a book's on an important subject and a subject you're interested in, you'll want to “chew and digest” it.

If the book's in English, that may mean slow progress for you. But I don't advise you to read too slowly. When I was living in Tokyo many years ago, I used to go to the second-hand bookshops. They were full of English books. The first twenty or thirty pages of many of them had their margins filled with pencilled notes and there were dozens of words and phrases underlined. The owners, probably earnest students, had started out very seriously, determined to master the books. Then, as I turned the pages over, I found clean white margins, with not a single note. It was clear that the reader had given up in despair.

I suppose that's a common experience in many countries with books in a foreign language. The reader starts out, full of hope and determination. Then the need to turn to a dictionary or a reference book, perhaps ten or even twenty times a page, tires him out.

There are two or three answers to this problem. The first is: Don't start reading a book unless you see, from the first few pages, that it's one you can read with ease and understanding. Don't try to run before you can walk. There are plenty of books that have been rewritten in simple language— and shortened too, if necessary.

My second answer to this question of difficult vocabulary is, I think, a much better one. Don't stop every time you come to a word or phrase you don't know. Read the whole chapter quickly. Quite often you'll find the unknown word comes again, perhaps several times, and by the end of the chapter you'll have guessed its meaning. That's how we learn the meaning of words in our own language, isn't it? When we' re children, I mean. When I'm telling a story to children, they seldom stop to ask what a word means. Even when they read, they don't turn to the dictionary every time they see an unknown word.

Read a chapter quickly, and then go back and read it more slowly. This time, use your reference books when necessary. But try to judge what is worth looking up and what is not.

You'll tell me that it's difficult, very often, for you to judge whether an unknown word is important or not. I agree that this is often true. But it's not always difficult. You're going to be an architect, so words used in architecture are important to you. If they're new to you, you'll look them up. But if the reader is not interested in architecture, he could pass them by. They're not at all necessary for his enjoyment of the book.

When I read my *Times* these days I often find articles about the uses of atomic energy. There are sometimes words I don't know—and some of them are so new that they're not yet in the dictionaries. But I'm slowly beginning to understand what some of the words mean—simply by meeting them so often.

Well, that's my advice to you. I hope you'll find it helpful. It isn't perfect, I know. There will be times when, if you decide not to look up a reference, you'll miss something that may be important.

But I feel I'm right in advising you not to be too thorough in your use of reference books—except when you're studying your own special subject. If you're too thorough, you'll lose heart and perhaps give up.

Good luck to you in your reading. Do write again, and if you think I can help you in any way, please don't hesitate to ask.

Yours ever,

John Churchman