What are we looking for under the book binding? Why do we open it?

We are looking for pleasure. We are looking for answers to what torments us, perhaps unconsciously torments us. We are looking for wisdom. And we are looking for entertainment - the book gives us entertainment. Of course, we are also looking for knowledge. We want the book to tell about ourselves, and we look for examples in it by which we could determine our goals. What is good, what is bad, what is evil and what is good – we also learn about this from books. We look for friends in books. Pechorin and Natasha Rostova are closer than their neighbors: we know more about Pechorin and Natasha. No living person will open his soul to us with such sincerity as the hero of a good book.

At the beginning of the list, the word "pleasure" was placed. Perhaps the reader was surprised. But this is certain, it is mandatory! If there is no enjoyment of the book, there is no reading, there is no reader. Indifferent turning of pages, cold observation of what is happening in a book is not reading. Admiration of the art of the writer and poet, relishing the word and combinations of words, delight at a successful expression, amazement at the skill of depiction and description, excitement caused by the depth of thought — this is reading. And this enjoyment of mastery teaches us, but in some other sense of the word "teaches", in such a way that the concept of "learning" does not quite fit. Skill, depth of thought tune us to a sublime mood, show the heights of life, develop taste. Mastery is always instructive.

In his old age, Goethe reread the whole of Molière every spring to maintain his taste. Even he had to apply himself to the standard of purity of speech, elegance of thought, high morality. This is Goethe. What should we do then?

Take care of your taste.

What determines the artistry of a book? How to learn to distinguish a good book from a bad one? Strengthening the taste from relaxing?

It is not the word, not the style that ultimately determines the quality of the book, but its direction, the pressure of ideas, the saturation of content. They say it's an "empty" book. What about "empty"? It has three hundred pages of text! But the author had nothing to say that was not known before him. Sometimes three hundred or a thousand pages were written and printed, but there was emptiness in them, ideological and artistic.

Very few books are always worthy of the attention of the true reader. Such books are called classical.

3

Classics are the best, most magnificent books created over the centuries. People learn from these books, everyone knows them. This is the golden fund of culture. Not knowing a classic book is always a little embarrassing, and some people, even if they haven't read a classic book, won't admit it. They say: "I have read, of course, I have read..." – but they themselves are very ashamed at this moment, as if they were caught in a bad deed. But it is true: not to read the best books of mankind is not a bad deed?

It is said that a person can read about four thousand books in a lifetime. This is a lot. If they were all in the apartment, people would say: "The whole house is covered with books!" In the district village library there are usually eight to ten thousand books, in the library of the city school forty to fifty thousand, but among them there are many that are not worth reading, without which you can live.

And there are not so many books without which it is impossible to live, truly classic books of world literature: two or three hundred, depending on how you count. For example, in order to get acquainted with the main works of the Russian classics of the nineteenth century, one must read four volumes of Pushkin, three volumes of Gogol, three or four volumes of Turgenev, four or five volumes of Dostoevsky, one volume of Chernyshevsky, five or six volumes of Tolstoy, one volume of Nekrasov, four or five volumes of Chekhov — about thirty books in all. Is it really that much? If you read only one volume a month and start serious reading from the fifth or sixth grade (and this is how they usually start), then it turns out that the list can be significantly expanded. And it turns out that it is not at all difficult to read two or three hundred books of the main circle of Russian and world classical literature before graduating from school. By the age of seventeen or eighteen, a normal developed person usually finishes reading the main books; for another five years he "gets" what he missed, and then for the rest of his life...

Then all his life he reads these books again and again in order to keep them in his memory, in his soul. Classic books differ in that they can be reread all your life, although their content is known. Moreover, with each new reading, they give a new pleasure, a new joy, incomparable with the joy of the first reading. Actually, the reader is not the one who reads. The reader is the one who rereads. Gradually, these best, classic books fill our spiritual world, and only from this time do we begin to approach what is called a "cultured person." To graduate from school and not read the main classical books by this time, not to love them, not to reread them means to deceive both yourself and the people around you: everyone will think that you have a secondary education, but you do not have it, you only have a first certificate, but not an education. There is no education without reading classic books.

The life of a serious, cultured reader goes in "waves". It's strange to ask him: "Who is your favorite writer?" Today it is Tolstoy, and tomorrow it will be Kuprin, suddenly you want to reread it, and two years later - Goethe, and three years later - Thomas Mann, and then - Pushkin... A person changes, his interests change, but he can always find something important and necessary in the boundless (by thought boundless, and not by the number of books!) treasury of world literature. He will always find what he cannot live without today.