One night when his son was more than three years old, he was tired of playing and leaned against the sofa and did nothing. I was tidying up my bookshelves when I happened to find a full translation of Wilde's fairy tale "Happy Prince" and read it to him. I don't expect him to listen patiently, because there are too many artistic details in this full translation. I just want to relive my feelings when I first read this fairy tale, when I was a freshman in high school. The swallow shuttled back and forth between the Happy Prince and the tailor mother of the sick child, the young man who wrote the script, the little match girl and other poor people, again and again from the Happy Prince, the huge red jewel on the hilt, the bright Indian sapphire in the eyes, and the naked golden leaves every day, the swallow said I was going to Egypt! But the Happy Prince also asked you to stay again and again. Would you like to spend another night with me? The story moves forward in such repetition, mixed with the description of the environment and the rendering of the atmosphere, which makes the originally uncomplicated story seem a little complicated, can the three-year-old son understand it? But unexpectedly, he listened very carefully. I can't read very fast. It takes me more than twenty minutes to read six thousand words. During these twenty minutes, my son was absorbed from beginning to end, and he had never been so absorbed for such a long time. Towards the end of the story, the swallow fell at the feet of the Happy Prince and died, and the Happy Prince's lead heart split in two. At this point, my voice trembled, just like the strong feelings I had when I read it for the first time, and I didn't feel numb because I knew the end of the story. I subconsciously looked up and suddenly found that my son's eyes were moist, and he almost burst into tears! This is by no means his usual kind of crying, innocent children will not cry like this, this is a kind of sad, lost, heartache moved. At that moment, I felt very lucky, glad that my son was so moved.
Did the story itself give it to him? At that time, although he could not read, I bought him a lot of books and often accompanied him to read with his children. He had read more than this vivid, complex, tense and exciting story, but I had never seen his heartfelt mixed emotions. What power moved him for the first time? It should be said that it is the power of literature and the power of art. All the descriptions and details are not optional, and it is precisely because of their existence that my son and I were easily brought into the depths of the story for more than 20 minutes, as if we were immersed in the atmosphere carefully created by Oscar Wilde and as if we were there. We were infected by the compassionate humanistic feelings contained in the story, moved, and spiritually edified. Just imagine, if the story is condensed and abbreviated so that there are only 600 words left in 6,000 words, I think it will not be a problem to tell the story clearly and clearly. In other words, the story will be told more clearly, straightforward and clear at a glance, but I am afraid that neither my 16-year-old nor my three-year-old son will be touched at all. This is like picking off all the leaves of a big tree with luxuriant leaves, and even cutting off some branches, leaving the distinct trunk, the tree seems to be still a tree, but the tree is no longer that tree.
After that, when I bought books for my son, I consciously wanted to buy him some original or full translations. But every time I go back to the bookstore, I always take advantage of the fun, but I come back disappointed. There are a lot of children's books in the bookstore. I dare not say that they occupy half of the country, and they are absolutely important. But pick over and pick the past, but the classic books you want to buy are nowhere to be seen. In fact, there are many Chinese and foreign classic stories on the bookshelf, from Romance of the three Kingdoms and Journey to the West to Hans Christian Andersen's Fairy Tales and Grimm's Fairytales. There are also "Alice in Wonderland", "adventures of puppets", "the Wizard of Oz", "the Adventures of the bragging King" and other books that nourish my soul everywhere. If you take a closer look, although the publishing houses are different and belong to different series of books, they are almost all abbreviated books and art books. These books are well printed, and most of them are printed in copper paper. They are picked up suddenly, and they are really a little admiring. Abbreviated version of the simplified version of it, so that those classic characters in the child's mind to leave a preliminary impression, can also let the child appreciate the charm of the classic in advance. So he paid to buy back a few copies.
When I got home, I read it carefully, but I was deceived. The best case is: a tree without branches and leaves, dry is tantamount to a dead tree, those graceful words, those wonderful chapters, those vivid details, where are all gone? That's lucky. To make matters worse, the text is impassable, the characters are not smooth, and there are a lot of typos, especially some pinyin readings, which are clearly intended for children who are still at the literacy stage to have no difficulty in reading, but there are a lot of pinyin mistakes, especially polyphonic words. regardless of the number of words, all are generated automatically, isn't this a greater obstacle to children's reading? What's more, some abbreviators and adapters think they are better than the ancients, casually change the original appearance of the story, and talk about what is new, new interpretation, and romance. In another case, the beautifully bound hard leather cover clearly shows "Hans Christian Andersen's Fairy Tales", but there is an article "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" in it. Who knows, this famous story was written and published by Jacob Green of Germany in 1812. The story is based on a real character with a name in Lohr am main in western Germany. When this masterpiece was published, Hans Christian Andersen, who was born in Denmark, was just seven years old. He was living in a narrow house with his shoemaker's father and mother of a washerwoman, and was playing puppet show in a toy theater. Later, Hans Christian Andersen also had a famous article, the Snow Queen, whose name is similar, but it is not the same thing at all. Alas, such a golden and failed book is the most terrible book.
Even if the classics are interpreted in this way, those youthful campuses, fantasy traverses, swords and swords are even more unflattering. This is a bit of a generalization, as if to raise a stick to hit a large area, in fact, there are very good children's books, but these sparkling gold has long been submerged in the sea of quantity. In the face of a dazzling array of books, I am dazzled and unable to choose. It is impossible for me to turn over each book, let alone read each book from beginning to end, and then decide whether to buy it or not.
Buying books for my son is like this, and I am faced with the same dilemma when I choose books for myself. There was a time when I had to wait for a book to pass, the bookstore was still in a prominent position, the media and reviews were still applauding, and there were still people reading it on the street before I was willing to pay for it. Even so, however, it is becoming less and less reliable. Many books are best-selling and long-selling. Publishers have printed and printed them again and again, and pirates with a keen sense of smell have long put pirated books all over the street, and newspapers and radio have spared no effort to promote and introduce them. It is really a bit of an expensive frame of Luoyang paper, but it is not the case. Of course, this has something to do with my personal interest in reading. No matter how good the book is, it has to be to my own taste. Coming and going like this, I have found that those books that are popular for a time are often exciting plots, full of suspense, interlinked and frightened step by step, or the sword is on the wrong side, a whole field that no one can tell or understand. Anyway, you don't know if it's true or false, and you don't know what the author says. For example, a man who has never had a formal job has to write officialdom. Someone who doesn't even dare to buy a stock has to write about a business war.
Some of these books are not bad. Arthur Conan Doyle, an English detective novelist at the end of the 19th century, created a brilliant detective image. after more than a hundred years, the popular novel complete works of Sherlock Holmes, which combines detective, suspense and reasoning, is still selling well and has become a classic in the history of literature. If a certain book today can stand the test of time in this way, of course, it is a good thing. But the crux of the problem is that such books have unwittingly become the mainstream of books, and have a great tendency to become unique, and there are no other books. When the publishing house selects the topic, probably the first thought is that there is a good market, easy to sell, in order to have higher profits and higher returns, so they especially favor those writers and works who can tell stories.
The situation of being able to tell stories is even more prominent on major literary websites. Whether you talk about network literature or type literature, in short, your story is to be able to catch people, and never let go if you catch it. The secret is actually very simple, one is fast, the other is many, the core of which is fast. Because with speed, there can be quantity, and with quantity, there can be readers, and with readers, there can be benefits. As a result, there is an incredible code speed of 10,000 to 20,000 words a day, which is unmatched by most traditional writers. I used to naively think that these online writers must be sitting in front of the computer day and night, thinking that there is no other fun in life except code words. It was not until I came into contact with some great online writers that I knew that they had worked hard, but they lived a moist life, and they would usually get together with friends, chat, sing and drink. Although they were under more pressure, they were able to deal with it calmly. Of course, at this time, they have stood on the pinnacle of online literature, have hundreds of thousands of fans, they only need to write 3,000 words a day to maintain their popularity. However, most of these great gods have experienced the stage of 10,000 to 20,000 words a day, and only so fast can they be sure to raise more and more fans. Because readers should read at least one chapter, that is, three thousand words, every day when they read your works. With this base, readers will keep on reading. And if you want to make the reader satisfied, you need at least two chapters and six thousand words, and if you want the reader to follow, you need three chapters and nine thousand words. If you want to make the reader addicted, you need four chapters and 12000 words. You really want to make the reader happy, make the reader happy, and let the reader be infatuated with it. Besides you don't read anything else, you have to write more than 15000.
Writing so fast, of course, will become a radish quickly without washing mud, it will inevitably be shoddy, and inevitably inject water into the story. Water injection is by no means different from the artistic expression in literary works, or even completely contrary to art. The purpose of water injection is not to make a big tree lush, but to turn the original seven or eight taels of pork into a kilo, which is not only of poor taste, low quality and perishable, but also can cause disease, and even cause cancer and teratogenicity, causing serious harm to people's health.
Literature inevitably tells stories, but literature is not just stories, let alone stories of adulteration and water injection. If you think about it, you can tell stories, only stories, and water injection stories. In fact, the root does not lie in literary creation and book publishing.
Literary works have to be read, and only when someone has read and understood them can their value be realized. This process is the process of literary acceptance. Under the condition of market economy, books are undoubtedly closer to a kind of commodity, since there is a commodity attribute, then there is a relationship between supply and demand. According to the theory of market allocation, what kind of demand there is, there are what kind of products, and it is demand that determines production. Readers are not only the main body of literary acceptance, but also the demanders of literary works. In a sense, the reading needs of readers determine what kind of works writers create, what kind of works publishers publish, and what kind of works literary websites put on the home page.
In this way, the problem lies in the readers, or in other words, the reading problems of the vast majority of readers. Indeed, now more and more readers only like those short and lively works that are exciting, suspense, eye-catching, or entertaining to death, even if they have been filled with water, they don't care, anyway, they write ten thousand words anyway. People who read books also act with one eye and look at the screen at a glance, but it is not so important whether they have literary connotation or literary characteristics. This coincides with what Zhang ailing said a few years ago: it is very likely that the Chinese will not even be able to read A Dream of Red Mansions at some point in the future. Now, not only do few people read A Dream of Red Mansions original, I'm afraid even people who adapt TV series don't bother to read them. They just listen to a few stories about Red Mansions in a teahouse restaurant or cafe and, in the spirit of entertainment supremacy, make new and bold creations. Not to mention that A Dream of Red Mansions has not been read, Zhang ailing may not have thought of it, and even few people have read her books. Readers are online, in front of computer screens, in front of all kinds of mobile terminal screens.
An expert friend who studies network literature sprang up one day and talked about the magnificence, ascendant and strong momentum of today's network literature, and made a bolder prediction than Zhang ailing: at some point in the future, network writers will take over the baton of Chinese literature and carry the banner of the prosperity and development of Chinese literature. I really can't listen to it and retort: I admit that in such a large army of online writers, there may be so many young people in literature. Of course, they are just seedlings, but they can never become the main force of Chinese literature. In the future, the mode of transmission of literature may change, just like after the popularization of papermaking, people no longer write words on silk, but this is only a change in the carrier, the essence of literature will not change, and network literature can never replace traditional literature. It has been a hundred years since the creation of vernacular, aren't people still reading Tang and Song ci? The expert friend said: today's young people all grew up reading online literature, and these-lsquo; Internet generation-rsquo; will certainly not accept traditional literature in the future. At that time, no one will read it, won't traditional literature completely withdraw from the stage of history? To say this, it may be a joy for him, but a worry for me. If there is a day when no one will read the treasure house of excellent literature accumulated by thousands of years of Chinese civilization, will it not be the sorrow of a nation?
From this I think of Russia as a nation. As we all know, Russia has great literature, and most of the characters who can engrave their names in Russian history are great writers. Even as foreigners, we can casually say these mouthful names: Pushkin, Gogol, Chekov, Gorky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chernishevsky, Dostoevsky. There are five Nobel Prize winners in Russia alone: Ivan? Bunin, Sholokhov, Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, Brozki.
Why are there so many literary giants in that nation? Of course, there are many reasons. But we have to admit that Russians love reading. People who have been to Russia have an impression that people reading books can be seen everywhere on roadside benches, on park lawns, in cafes, buses and subway carriages, even in some shopping malls and supermarkets. People who wait in line for shopping will also magically create a book and take advantage of this time to read a paragraph. By the way, what they are advocating is not an online novel. If you meet an old man on Yabao Road in Beijing and want to go up and have a chat but don't know where to start, I suggest you talk to them about Evgeny? Onegin, Anna? Karenina, Gregory, Dr. Zhivago, Raskolnikov, keep them eloquent and eloquent with you for a long time. When I first practiced spoken Russian, I often had such a set of magnetism with them. With a few words, I could easily get closer to each other, no longer strange, no longer vigilant and wary. From their words, I can always feel their heartfelt excitement, as if I had met a bosom friend in a foreign country.
Russians' respect for literary classics and writers seems to be soaked into the blood of the nation, and there is such a DNA. For example, in the streets, intersections and square lawns of Moscow and St. Petersburg, there are towering and lifelike statues of people. In these statues, literary masters such as Pushkin, Tolstoy, Ostrovsky, Lemontov, Mayakovsky, and even Pushkin's wife, Natalia, can always be seen. Like Peter the Great, Yekaterina and Lenin, they stood there quietly, watching the hustle and bustle under their feet. Walking, inadvertently, you pass by these great writers. Perhaps it is in the course of passing by again and again that Russians unwittingly improve their reading consciousness, have more desire and self-consciousness of reading, and have the pursuit and self-confidence of their own national literature. I think this is at least one of the reasons why Russia can produce great writers like the stars.
Compared with the Russian nation, the Chinese nation, which has a long history of 5,000 years, actually has a more glorious history of literature, and our great writers are no less than them. It is possible that we are short of reading, of reverence for literature, and of respect for traditional culture.
But once again, there is something wrong with the reader's reading, in fact, it is not just the reader's problem.
The rapid development of the times, changing with each passing day, first of all manifested in our pace of life, the pace of work has been greatly accelerated. There is a famous saying in the 1980s: time is money and efficiency is life. This sentence is not mentioned much now, and it is no longer hanging everywhere. Do not mention, it is not unimportant, but has long been penetrated into the bones of every Chinese, really into the brain into the heart, there is no need to talk about it. The faster the pace is, the greater the pressure will be. After a hard day's work, we still have to suffer from traffic jams on the road, and we also have to worry about picking up our children to and from school all the time until the weekends, and we also have to urge their children to do their homework and take them to extracurricular classes all over the world. Empty nest parents also need us to find some free time, take the children, and go home often. There are days when there are old people, young people and leaders in the middle. How can we have time to study? The whole time we can find is to be stuck in traffic for an hour, but our bus and subway are crowded and crowded, and even if we have a little time, we don't have the mood, ah, how can we be like British, French, Japanese and Russian citizens? how can you do magic to make a book? At most, they take out their mobile phones, play games, post Wechat, and watch blockbusters to see which star has opened what door, which celebrity has married and divorced whom, and where has killed a tiger or fly.
Of course, among those who indulge in mobile phones, there are indeed people who read e-books. Some people say that it is the progress of science and technology, the network and mobile terminals that have brought people back to the ranks of reading. But it is the double-edged sword of science and technology, we ushered in an era of indiscriminate spending and attractive images, animation, games, film and television can catch people's eyes more than words. What is more worrying is that two-dimensional, flat film and television can no longer meet people's visual requirements, so all movies have become 3D and television has 3D. That's not enough, so shake the chair and let the gas and liquid squirt out, which is 4D and 5D. Moreover, it is said that there have been interactive movies that can be played by combining game entertainment with dynamic cinema technology, and the outcome of participation is up to the audience. according to the film genealogy, this should be 6D and 7D. If 2D film and television still have some artistic feeling, and the texture of film can still give people some beautiful artistic enjoyment, 3D, 4D, 5D and 6D and 7D, which will eventually be promoted, may only leave people with excitement and fun. this may be what people are after. Therefore, the development of science and technology makes people farther and farther away from words, especially beautiful characters, over time, people's thinking will become lazy, people's imagination will be greatly reduced.
It's not the fault of technology. It's just that with the development of science and technology, economic progress, and material wealth, people's footsteps are too hasty, people's figures are too tired to calm down, their hearts are floating and irritable, and they are impetuous that they do not notice that the spiritual world is becoming more and more scarce.
We also went back to the subway, back to the bus, in fact, is not absolutely no one to read. I have met a person holding a book more than once, and the respect in my heart suddenly arises. To tell you the truth, I love reading, but I have hardly read books on the subway and bus. The environment there is too noisy and overcrowded, so it is not easy to calm down and study. But when I approached them intentionally or unintentionally, the books in their hands were not the idle books I thought they were. A young man was looking at the problem sets of the physician qualification examination. while watching it, he was doing multiple-choice questions with a pencil. Each A, B, C, and D filled the whole problem. It seems that this book must be thrown away after it has been used. A girl should be holding a book on accounting. I glanced at it. It was all data and statistical tables, which I could not understand. On the other hand, I am too familiar with the books read by a young man. I have also read the application theories used in the civil service examination, and the contents are more or less the same. On another occasion, when the whole road was packed, I inadvertently glanced out of the window on the bus and saw a woman in her thirties in a white car who was simply reading a book. and from time to time from the co-driver's position to take a book to write down something. I can't see what kind of book she is reading, but judging from the style, it must be some kind of exam book.
My heart is still full of respect, sincerely admire their nail spirit against the clock. I am not saying that there is anything wrong with reading textbooks and examination books. unfortunately, I only see people who read these books.
If you look at the layout of the bookstore, you can understand one or two. Most comprehensive bookstores, which occupy the most prominent position and the largest area, are often teaching auxiliary books, starting with children's preschool education and school preparation, followed by simultaneous tutoring in primary, junior high and senior high schools, to postgraduate entrance exams, doctoral exams and books for lawyers, physicians, accountants, architects, MBA, MPA, TOEFL, GRE, IELTS and so on. In second place, there are all kinds of motivational books. The motivational books I am talking about here are in a broad sense, in addition to interpersonal communication, office rules, love manuals, treasure books for getting rich, and philosophical articles like chicken soup for the soul. Children's books also account for a large proportion, and some of them are written for parents. Since the popularity of "a good mother is better than a good teacher", books on how to be a father, how to be a mother, and how to educate children have shown a blowout.
Everyone is saying that literature has been marginalized, so it is true that literary books are hidden in the most inconspicuous corner of the bookstore.
In other words, reading a few more novels can't help anyone get a higher degree or a better career, and it won't bring more money to anyone. No one reads literature, only people read practical books. It is the utilitarian thought that no profit cannot afford to rise early. In fact, reading with a utilitarian color has existed since ancient times, and it is not new. There is an old saying: if no one asks in the cold window of ten years, he will become famous all over the world. Head hanging beam, cone piercing, capsule firefly reflect snow, it is not without hard work, but the purpose of doing so is to one day or Zhuang Yuan or Fan Jin. There is also an old saying: the book has its own beauty such as jade, the book has its own golden house, this saying is even more attractive: study hard, read the book, there will be beauty, there is money.
I'm afraid it's too narrow to understand the function of reading in this way.
No wonder booksellers have come to the conclusion that students' money is too easy to earn, and books that have something to do with children are too easy to sell. For example, some composition books, casually change the title of the book, called "Daquan" or "secrets", in fact, the content is the same, or even exactly the same. But parents do not care about money, as long as it is beneficial to their children's learning, they buy everything, and there is a momentum of no rejection. The ancients said: never too old to learn. Now the understanding of this character learning is narrow, and it is never too old to take an exam. all the people are students and are taking all kinds of qualifications.
This involves the current examination-oriented education system and talent selection mechanism. Examination-oriented education makes children tired to cope with, only know how to immerse themselves in textbooks, problem sets, where do they have time to read what leisure books? Under this system, the purpose of their study is purely for further study, and of course, it is for a bright future. How can they be interested in such a study? The same is true of talent selection. Just take the professional title examination as an example, a literary editor, as long as he is old enough, not to test his Chinese level and literary accomplishment, but to test English. Those with CET-4 can be promoted to secondary vocational schools, and those with CET-6 can be promoted to higher vocational education. I majored in Russian. When I was promoted from an assistant translator to a translator, I was also exempted from the Russian test and only took an English test. I can't help but wonder, can a high level of English mean a high level of Russian? If this is the case, do not even learn to drive for the driver's license in the future, just take the English test, send the C book of CET-4, the B-book of CET-6, and the A book of CET-8. In this way, everyone will find it funny, but isn't it a reason that other professions that need professional standards have to take an English test? In fact, the purpose of such an examination is not to train or select people, but to screen out some people.
Reading motivational books is not for exams, but it is also for similar utilitarian purposes. For young people who are new to society, choose one or two good self-help books to read, touch the heart, have some resonance, and arouse some thinking about society and life. Perhaps we can really find some reference and reference from it, so as to take fewer detours in the workplace, love, and business. However, do not think that the book is full of good advice and words, let alone regard it as a treasure book or Bible, thinking that you can calmly deal with all the difficulties in reality with one volume in hand. from then on, the cause of love is easy, and people are well-versed in all aspects of the world. to deal with the business world leisurely, officialdom is under control, and the world is invincible. It would be nice if these books can be managed for a while, but how can they be managed for a long time? In particular, some self-help books pose as experienced people, pretending to be deep, condescending, talking on paper, and cramming indoctrination, but the so-called theories are just beautiful ideals and wishful thinking, always floating in mid-air, unable to reach the sky or landing on the ground, and even lack of insights, or even cobbled together and clung to them casually. You will encounter all kinds of difficulties and problems in your life, even if the problem you encounter is the same as what is said in the book, you can actually distinguish it in detail. and because of different times, different places, different environments, different people, different mood, it is naturally impossible to follow the cat and tiger according to the clues, how can there be any axioms, laws, or even formulas? In the end, difficulties are not solved by words, but also by your wisdom, your self-cultivation, and your self-cultivation.
So, where does wisdom, self-cultivation and self-cultivation come from?
Voltaire said: reading brightens the mind and eyes. Bacon said: reading makes a man a perfect person. Roman Roland said: no one has ever read in order to read, only to read themselves in books, to find themselves in books, or to examine themselves. This is all about the function of reading. However, reading is a slow effort, and it is impossible to get a quick return in a short period of time. It is impossible to put down a book. You will have wisdom, self-cultivation and self-cultivation immediately, and you will be able to become a perfect person. If a person is compared to a piece of jade, then the process of reading is like the process of raising jade. If you want to make jade warm and moist, you must always wear jade and let your temperature moisten jade day after day. Reading is in the process of imperceptibly influencing, nourishing all things silently, in the process of long-term influence and edification, so that our humanistic accomplishment and spiritual realm can be promoted. Therefore, even if measured by utilitarianism, reading is the most valuable long-term investment for a person's life.
Jews are such a people who are good at taking reading as a long-term investment. It is said that his mother would read the Bible to a Jewish child soon after he was born. At this time, how can the child understand? But every time a wise Jewish mother reads a passage, she asks her child to stick out her tongue to lick the honey. When the child is a little older, the mother will drop honey on the Bible and let the child go to the book to lick the drop of honey. When they are in primary school, the teacher will also put a clean slate in the classroom and write down the Hebrew alphabet and simple Bible sentences in honey. The children read the letters and lick off the honey on the slate, and then, there are honey cakes, apples and walnuts to eat. The story sounds a bit like Pavlov's conditioned experiment, but it does work. The sweet seeds of the book are planted in the hearts of Jewish children, and reading becomes a thing closely related to beauty and sweetness. Opening the book is like entering a paradise full of laughter and laughter. No wonder they regard books as their inseparable friends all their lives. Some overseas media have made a statistics on the number of books read per person per year: 21 for Americans, 17 for Japanese, less than 3 for Chinese and 64 for Jews, that is to say, Jews read Chinese books for the whole year every two weeks or so. No wonder Jews are recognized as the wisest people all over the world.
In fact, reading is really sweeter than honey. Montesquieu said: to love reading is to change the lonely and boring time of life into a moment of great enjoyment. Of course, if you study with a strong sense of purpose and utilitarianism, I am afraid you will not experience such enjoyment, but will feel some bitterness and tiredness. For example, there are many erythrologists whose purpose in life is to study A Dream of Red Mansions, so they will be very tired to study in order to produce research results. I would rather be an ordinary reader, putting aside purpose and utilitarianism, taking the most comfortable posture and reading heavy classics as idle books. It is good to understand, but there is no need to delve into what you don't understand. You don't have to worry about what the good lines in the poems mean and what esoteric things are contained in the dialogue. It's a bit like listening to music. We are always moved by beautiful melodies, but we don't necessarily have to make clear the ugliness of this song.
We might as well take a look at Thomas Alva Edison, who made outstanding achievements in the field of natural science. As we all know, Edison, who had just started school, always asked the teacher some strange questions, so after only three months of school, he was dismissed by the teacher as a moron and kicked out of school. Such a naughty child later had 1328 patents for inventions such as incandescent lights, gramophones, moving films, automatic Telegraph machines, and shorthand machines. So is Edison a genius? In this regard, Edison once had a famous saying we are familiar with: genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. The sweat here may be talking about stories that we don't know much about. Mother took little Edison home, but did not let him go. she gave little Edison books, from Robinson Crusoe to Les Miserables, from Shakespeare to Dickens, and from novels to Gibbon's History of the Roman Empire, Hume's History of England and Hill's History of the World. Of course, there are Parker's "Natural and Experimental philosophy" and Newton's "Mathematical principles of Natural philosophy" which had a great influence on him. It is said that little Edison was so fond of Hugo that his friends called him Victor Hugo Edison. In this way, the amount of books read by a teenager far exceeds that of the obedient classmates who remain in the classroom. When little Edison reached the age of 12, he began his career as a newsboy on a train from his hometown of Port Huron to Detroit in order to make a living and to make money. The train stops in Detroit for six hours every day, and little Edison runs to the Detroit Public Library every day, rain or shine, to concentrate on reading until it is time for the train to return. He even planned to read all the 16,000 books here, and when he grew up, he was determined to build a large research institute with a library as big as here and as many books as here.
If Parker and Newton's books are useful to Edison, then I can't imagine what kind of concrete help those literary and historical books can give to a natural science inventor. Edison said: reading is to wisdom what gymnastics is to the body. I think the function of these idle books may lie in its spirituality. They have sound and color, taste, feeling, thickness, strength, depth and temperature. in the process of reading attentively, they murmur and gallop their imaginations. for people thousands of miles away, joys and sorrows, spiritual communication and spiritual dialogue with them infects our hearts and edifies our temperament little by little. Opening up our spiritual space, providing strong support for our spiritual world, so that we are no longer lonely and helpless.
Although reading is good, the benefit may come too slowly, just like raising jade, slow workers can do fine work precisely to see the real kung fu. Hide a piece of jade close to the body, skin blind date, meticulous care, after days of playing and wearing, jade will not live up to your strands of nourishment, impurities lines will slowly fade until disappear, jade is more spiritual and moisturizing. If you are eager for quick success and quick profit, you must immediately increase your IQ and EQ by 10%, then you may have to polish it with cheap green powder, like some illegal jade merchants, or even burn off a layer of jade, or use some chemical method to process it into ancient jade. It turns out that's what it looks like, but in fact it's a completely different story.
Then again, in fact, many people still want to read from the bottom of their hearts, especially good books. But why didn't they read it? I think they have the same confusion as I do: they don't know what to read.
We often say that the great development and prosperity of Chinese literature is first of all reflected in the number of literary works. This number is innumerable, although our country implements the book number examination and approval system, but still can not accurately count the number of new literary works published every year. There is an approximate number of novels, each year is more than 2000, which refers to the newly published, does not include reprint, reprint, of course, can not include a larger number of online novels. If there is a large quantity, it is inevitable that there will be mud and sand. As gatekeepers of book production, literary editors are no longer willing to make wedding clothes for others like their predecessors, but they are more like an intermediary, whose main task is to attract both authors and readers, but to support two families with one hand, but to put the works in a dispensable situation, high style, low style, high level and low standard are all pushed to the society. In front of such a mixed mountain of books, one must know how to refuse and exclude before he can find what he wants and enter the real reading. But no one can pick out the best work on his own. Therefore, people today can't read the good book they need to read more than ever before.
Choosing books is not as simple as shopping in the supermarket. Now there is a saying that those with high prices are not necessarily good, but those with low prices must be bad. In today's poor food quality, this is a helpless rule to avoid the harm of toxic and harmful things such as melamine and Sudan red as much as possible. But the book has never been priced according to the content and quality, and the price is about the same for books that are as thin and thick as they are. Even, for some books that were obviously published at their own expense, the author handed in 30,000 to 50,000 yuan to the publisher, and the publisher gave the author a thousand books, which were given to relatives, friends, colleagues and acquaintances. The rest can only be taken care of by the author's own broom. Although it has not entered the sales link at all, the pricing in the book is still magnificent. I am only talking about this phenomenon, but I do not dare to advocate that good books should be expensive. If that is the case, bad books may drive out good books.
The selection of books, publicity and hype are not credible. When a book comes out, the author wants to publicize it, and so does the publishing house, but if there are those who are rich and powerful, they will be more powerful, and those who are unable to do so will have a lower voice. In addition, we must ask some famous writers to recommend it together, print it on the waist cover or the back cover, or invite a group of critics to say something nice. In any case, no matter who it is, the book should be extremely good. Critics are also very helpless. It is not easy for people to work hard to write a book. Isn't the purpose of holding a seminar just to let us say something nice and support the audience? Besides, they are all people in the circle, bowed their heads and never looked up, and then took other people's red envelopes. With kindness, how could they not sing some hymns? The media is even more simple, you pay, I do things, how much you pay, how big I do. What do readers think of these so-called comments on propaganda and similar publicity? Maybe it's the same as the story of the wolf, once, twice, and the third time, no one believes it anymore. In this way, fewer and fewer people will go to school.
Under the circumstances that it is difficult to distinguish between the pros and cons, some people have to choose to read the classics. Classics are indeed worth reading, but reading classics is not necessarily necessary. The current new books may be more closely in line with the times, more likely to resonate with people, and easier for us to have a deep understanding of today's society. Take Lu Yao's "the ordinary World" as an example, how many people were moved by this long novel? How many people have you charmed? Including me who was in junior high school at that time. Two years ago, I was moved and read it again. The book is still so touching, but it is not the most primitive empathy when I read it for the first time. This probably means that the era described in the novel is different from the environment we live in today. And some of the current novels I have read should be on a par with the ordinary World, but why is the response not as strong as Lu Yao? It's because fewer people read it. We often say that classics have to be tested by time, but if there is only time and no one reads it, or very few people read it, no matter how well written the book is, it can only be like a piece of jade wrapped in stone, and it will never become a classic. Only when more and more people read books and read more and more books, will our times produce more future classics and more great writers.
After all, to solve our current reading problems, readers need to settle down, to abstain from impetuosity, to be utilitarian, and to be utilitarian at the same time. Of course, the realization of such a goal also requires writers, critics and editors to sink their hearts, abstain from impetuosity, utilitarianism and utilitarianism. We should not only do everything possible to meet the spiritual and cultural needs of readers, but also not blindly accommodate the tastes of readers, let alone cater to the tastes of the public. We should not only find ways to let more people read excellent works and make good works have a market, but also do not be influenced by the market wind to adhere to the minimum level of literary creation, let alone downgrade and copy in order to maximize interests. Vulgar, vulgar and kitsch. Without accumulating steps, it is impossible to reach thousands of miles, so it is necessary to guide and guide the readers to upgrade the aesthetic level step by step, and lead the public to improve the spiritual realm step by step. Isn't this the function of literature and reading?
Author: Li Qiang
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