In this article, I would like to discuss the insights on reading that have been discussed in Chinese language classes.
If one day you were to travel around the world and could only bring one beloved item on the ship, what would you choose? A painting? Throughout the journey of traveling the world, there are landscapes everywhere. A delicious dish? Food has an expiration date and once eaten, it's gone. A writer chose to bring a book, a book that can be read repeatedly, continuously, and each time it is read, there is something new to gain, a new world to explore.
As we grow older and gain more experience, our thinking deepens. Take for example the book "精读世说新语" by 戴建业 that I bought in my first year of junior high school. In my second year of junior high school, I reread this book twice and had a deeper understanding of some of the comments. For example, in my first year, when it came to the topic of plastic surgery, I could only think of hypocrisy. But in my second year, I realized that hypocrisy is constantly present in life, and we should not consider it a crime. (Otherwise, we would all be sinners) Like the story of Pao Ding Jie Niu, each practice brings new insights, and each rereading brings new gains.
As for the method of reading, since I haven't read many books other than the classics required by school, my reading experiences, such as reading papers, are not worth mentioning. (One night, I read many papers and my head was dizzy and painful. It seems that I am not suitable for reading papers.)
For this book, there are usually prefaces, translator's prefaces, and afterwords, which are usually introductions by the author or translator about the content of the book and its impact. Especially the translator's preface usually provides a summary of the author's entire life and an introduction to the author's background. If you just received a book and don't feel like reading the content, you can start by reading the translator's preface. (For some philosophical books, reading this way can avoid some thinking, but it doesn't have much effect.)
Some novels have multiple storylines, like "The Three-Body Problem", where each storyline may progress for three or four chapters before switching to another storyline. At this time, in order to ensure the continuity of the story, we may not have the energy to read some detailed analysis of the science fiction elements. You can try speed reading and skipping. Skipping may not be very obvious in this novel. In "Jane Eyre", when encountering conversations between the male protagonist Rochester and the female protagonist Jane, translated from English, they often appear verbose, and these conversations do not have much impact on the plot, so you can use the method of skipping appropriately.
As for the method of reading, Bacon once said in his essay "On Reading" that for lower-level books, you can have someone else read them and then take their summary. But for classics, reading the book itself is like distilling water, and chewing the wax.
Hesse once said in his article that it is difficult for us to read all the literature of a culturally developed nation in our lifetime. The process of reading is like a difficult journey of self-cultivation, done for the purpose of perfecting oneself, rather than for any specific goal.
Material possessions can be taken away, but cultivation and temperament cannot.