Every book stands by itself, like a one-family house, but books in a library are like houses in a city. Although they are separated, 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. Books influence each other; they link the past, the present and the future and have their own generations, like families. Wherever you start reading you connect yourself with one of the families of ideas, and in the long run, you not only find out about the world and the people in it; you find out about yourself, too.
Reading can only be fun if you expect it to be. If you concentrate on a book that means something to you, and 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.
