Reading is a pleasure of the mind, which means that it is a little like a sport: your eagerness and knowledge and quickness make you a good reader. Reading is fun, not because the writer is telling you something, but because it makes your mind work. Your own imagination works along with the author's or even goes beyond his. 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. Although they are separate, together they all add up to something; they are connected with each other and with other cities. The same ideas, or related ones, turn up in different places; the human problems that repeat themselves in life repeat themselves in literature, but with different solutions according to different writings at different times.

　　Reading can only be fun if you expect it to be. If you concentrate on books somebody tells 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.

　　【參考翻譯】

　　讀書是愉悅心智之事。在這一點上它與運動頗為相似:一個優秀的讀者必須要有熱情、有知識、有速度。讀書之樂并非在于作者要告訴你什么，而在于它促使你思考。你跟隨作者一起想像，有時你的想象甚至會超越作者的。把自己的體驗與作者的相互比較，你會得出相同或者不同的結論。在理解作者想法的同時，也形成了自己的觀點。

　　每一本書都自成體系，就像一家一戶的住宅，而圖書館里的藏書好比城市里千家萬戶的居所。盡管它們都相互獨立，但只有相互結合才有意義。家家戶戶彼此相連，城市與城市彼此相依。相同或相似的思想在不同地方涌現。人類生活中反復的問題也在文學中不斷重現，但因時代與作品的差異，答案也各不相同。

　　如果你希望的話，讀書也能充滿樂趣。倘若你只讀那些別人告訴你該讀之書，那么你不太可能有樂趣可言。但如果你放下你不喜歡的書，試著閱讀另外一本，直到你找到自己中意的，然后輕輕松松的讀下去，差不多一定會樂在其中。而且，當你通過閱讀變得更加優秀，更加善良，更加文雅時，閱讀便不再是一種折磨。