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"How are you coming with your home library? Do you need some good ammunition on why it's so important to read? The last time I checked the statistics...I think they indicated that only four percent of the adults in this country have bought a book within the past year. That's dangerous. It's extremely important that we keep ourselves in the top five or six percent.
In one of the Monthly Letters from the Royal Bank of Canada it was pointed out that reading good books is not something to be indulged in as a luxury. It is a necessity for anyone who intends to give his life and work a touch of quality. The most real wealth is not what we put into our piggy banks but what we develop in our heads. Books instruct us without anger, threats and harsh discipline. They do not sneer at our ignorance or grumble at our mistakes. They ask only that we spend some time in the company of greatness so that we may absorb some of its attributes.

You do not read a book for the book's sake, but for your own.

You may read because in your high-pressure life, studded with problems and emergencies, you need periods of relief and yet recognize that peace of mind does not mean numbness of mind.

You may read because you never had an opportunity to go to college, and books give you a chance to get something you missed. You may read because your job is routine, and books give you a feeling of depth in life.

You may read because you did go to college.

You may read because you see social, economic and philosophical problems which need solution, and you believe that the best thinking of all past ages may be useful in your age, too.

You may read because you are tired of the shallowness of contemporary life, bored by the current conversational commonplaces, and wearied of shop talk and gossip about people.

Whatever your dominant personal reason, you will find that reading gives knowledge, creative power, satisfaction and relaxation. It cultivates your mind by calling its faculties into exercise.

To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will tax the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.

"Reading is the key that opens doors to many good things in life. Reading shaped my dreams, and more reading helped me make my dreams come true."

-Ruth Bader Ginsburg

I know people who read interminably, book after book, from page to page, and yet I
should not call them 'well-read people'. Of course they 'know' an immense amount; but
their brain seems incapable of assorting and classifying the material which they have
gathered from books. They have not the faculty of distinguishing between what is
useful and useless in a book; so that they may retain the former in their minds and if
possible skip over the latter while reading it, if that be not possible, then — when once
read — throw it overboard as useless ballast. Reading is not an end in itself, but a means
to an end. Its chief purpose is to help towards filling in the framework which is made
up of the talents and capabilities that each individual possesses. Thus each one procures
for himself the implements and materials necessary for the fulfilment of his calling in
life, no matter whether this be the elementary task of earning one's daily bread or a
calling that responds to higher human aspirations. Such is the first purpose of reading.
And the second purpose is to give a general knowledge of the world in which we live.
In both cases, however, the material which one has acquired through reading must not
be stored up in the memory on a plan that corresponds to the successive chapters of the
book; but each little piece of knowledge thus gained must be treated as if it were a little
stone to be inserted into a mosaic, so that it finds its proper place among all the other
pieces and particles that help to form a general world-picture in the brain of the reader.
Otherwise only a confused jumble of chaotic notions will result from all this reading.
That jumble is not merely useless, but it also tends to make the unfortunate possessor of
it conceited. For he seriously considers himself a well-educated person and thinks that
he understands something of life. He believes that he has acquired knowledge, whereas
the truth is that every increase in such 'knowledge' draws him more and mo

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