Chapter Fifteen：The other half

        In chapter 15，the writer thinks most of the reader's life will not spend in reading the great books but newspapers and magazines.所以指出来读书的“禁区”，下面是读书的几条建议，相信对大家很有帮助。

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(1) Don't try to find a "message" in a novel, play, or poem. Imaginative writing is not primarily didactic. No great work of fiction is the sugar-coated propaganda that some recent critics would have us believe they all are.不要试图在小说、剧本或者是诗歌中寻找信息，伟大的作品并不需要华丽渲染的外衣，所以需要静心去感受作品的气息。

      （2）Don’t look for terms, propositions , and arguments  imaginative literature. Such things are logical, not poetic, devices. They are proper to that use of language which aims at communicating knowledge and ideas, but they are utterly foreign when language serves as a medium for the incommunicable—when it is employed creatively.在读书时，不要在富有想象力的文学作品中寻找术语、主张和论点。这些东西是合乎逻辑的，但它们不是诗意的。他们对语言的使用是恰当的，目的是传播知识和思想。所以我们并不能从中学到很多东西。

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(3) Don't criticize fiction by the standards of truth and consistency which properly apply to communications of ~ knowledge. The "truth" of a good story is its verisimilitude, its intrinsic probability or plausibility. 不要以真理和一致性的标准来批判小说，而这些标准适用于知识的传播。一个好故事的“真相”是它的逼真性、内在的可能性或可信性。It must be a likely story, but it need not describe the facts of life or society in a manner that is verifiable by experiment or research. 所以当我们读传记的时候，我们想知道一个人的真实生活。当我们读小说的时候，我们想要的故事必须是真实的，因为它可能发生在小说家创造的人物和事件的世界里。

      (4) Don't read all imaginative books eis if they were the same. Just as in the case of expository literature, here, too, there are differences in kind—the lyric, the novel, the play—which require appropriately different readings. 不要阅读同种类型的书，这样就相当于是在浪费时间，浪费生命。

    Finally, to make these "don'ts" more helpful, they must be supplemented by constructive suggestions. 读书有方法，也有捷径，只要掌握了这几种方法，往往可以事半功倍。

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