Reading: my beloved activity

What does reading give us? And why did I choose this (at the first sight) boring topic? I consider reading books to be very important because this activity gives us a possibility to gain new knowledge, to activate fantasy, to relax, to get to know our (or foreign) language better, to write in a proper way and to understand people more. The characters you meet in the world of books are various and sometimes you can even find your own personality in some of them.

But reading isn´t related to books only. Nowadays we can read newspaper, magazines, articles on the Internet, on teletext… We have many chances to find information we need. I personally think that reading is the best way how to do that because you don´t have to wait until the news on TV or radio start, you just sit in your armchair and read what you need. As far as I´m concerned the most comfortable way how to search for information nowadays is the Internet. You just switch your computer on, visit Google website and in a moment you find all you wanted. The only danger which is related to the Internet is that some of the information we can find there isn´t true. That´s why we should be careful when choosing the sources. In my opinion trustworthy ones are for example BBC or CNN.

Talking about the printed texts we´ve got two types of stuff which we can read – firstly the books, secondly newspapers and magazines. The main difference between most of the magazines and most of the books is that magazines react to the actual topics. It´s only logic if we think about how long it lasts to write and publish a book. Despite preferring books to magazines I must say that magazines have some advantages too. I have already mentioned the first – and the biggest one – chance of quick reaction to the recent problems. The second one is the addition of pictures (photos, sketches) to the text – it is easier for us to imagine the situation then. The third advantage is that it´s possible to read the whole magazine during thirty minutes – it´s quite practical because of our stressful way of life (we haven´t got very much time).

In my point of view it´s a quite sad fact that we haven´t got enough time for reading. It seems to me that in our society there are even people who aren´t able to read in a proper way. I don´t want to say that they don´t know what a single letter or a word mean but they aren´t able to make a summary and to realize what the paragraph they´ve read really means. I hope that this is only my feeling and the real situation is better but sometimes while talking to my relatives, classmates or friends I feel it could be the real problem. Maybe this could be caused by the fact that our schools don´t teach us how to understand things, they just make us remember some stuff.

Now I would like to return back to the books and say something about the types of books. We have fiction and factual books. The fiction books can be for example detective stories, historical novels, fairy tales, fables and so on. Factual literature is represented by biographies, descriptions of some events or explanations of some processes in physics, biology or chemistry. I think it would be good idea to mention encyclopedias focused on various topics as well because they are very useful for ordinary life. We can have encyclopedia of art, of big inventions in human history, of states etc. Encyclopedias can help us when we don´t understand something. Very helpful are also various dictionaries.

And what about reading and me? I´m convinced that it´s obvious that I like reading – especially books - very much. Reading a book is something like an adventure for me. Sometimes I even feel something like reader´s passion while reading. I just can´t stop emphatizing with the main character, thinking of what I would do if I were him, imagining the scenes and so on. I love those moments when I can lie on my bed with a book in my hand. The best time for reading (for me) is when the rest of my family is somewhere far away and nobody disturbs me. The world of books is so large and diverse that I can always find a book which pleases and comforts me. I prefer prose to poetry, because poetry is sometimes too complicated for me (but I read it as well). If I should answer the question who my favourite authors are, I would probably mention William Saroyan, Francois Villon and Václav Hrabě.