英譯漢

　　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.

　　參考譯文

　　讀書愉悅心靈，這幾有點兒像運動。一個優(yōu)秀的讀者必須要有熱情、知識、速度。讀書之樂不在于，作者在告訴你什么，而在于它促使你思考。你跟隨作者一起想象，有時你的想象甚至超越作者。你的經驗加上他的經驗，可以得到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。

　　每本書都隔成體系，就像一家一戶的住宅。而圖書館的藏書就像是城市里千家萬戶的居所。盡管他們相互獨立，但相互結合才有意義。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的地方涌現(xiàn)。人類生活中反復出現(xiàn)的問題在文學中也會不算重現(xiàn)。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。倘若你只讀別人告訴你應該讀的書，那么就不會感覺有樂趣而言。但是如果你放下不喜歡的，嘗試閱讀另外的，直到找到中意的為止，然后輕輕松松的讀下去，那一定會收獲一段美好時光——而且如果你因為讀書而變得更優(yōu)秀，更睿智，更友善，更文雅時，你就不會覺得閱讀是一種折磨。