Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought - asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation.
I cannot write in English, because of the treacherous spelling. When I am reading, I only hear it and am unable to remember what the written word looks like.
I really don't watch enough TV to know about the impact. In my experience as a TV writer, I would say is the exact opposite - it's very constricted, all having to conform to a form. My sense of fiction writing is not to think about rules but to be driven by the characters and their stories. I often ask myself what's at risk here, who needs what, and how are they going to get it. There has to be a reason for the reader to stop living their own life and start reading your book.
The saving of empty beer and liquor bottles is a strange college phenomenon. I bet most of you college students reading this right now have some empties on a shelf in your room. Everyone knows how much college kids like to drink, do we really need to display it? It's a good thing, though, that this trend stops after college. Wouldn't it be weird if your parents had empty wine bottles up on their bedroom wall?
Neither is a dictionary a bad book to read. There is no can't in it, no excess of explanation, and it is full of suggestion, the raw material of possible poems and histories.
My father loved biographies. He loved the true tales of interesting people that were shaping our culture. I get why he dug Vanity Fair. You feel smarter, somehow, for reading it.
By providing cheap and wholesome reading for the young, we have partly succeeded in driving from the field that which was positively bad; yet nothing is easier than to overdo a reformation, and, through the characteristic indulgence of American parents, children are drugged with a literature whose chief merit is its harmlessness.
Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, “and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversation?
Be sure then to read no mean books. Shun the spawn of the press on the gossip of the hour. Do not read what you shall learn, without asking, in the street and the train.
In an article on Bunyan lately published in the "Contemporary Review" - the only article on the subject worth reading on the subject I ever saw (yes, thank you, I am familiar with Macaulay's patronizing prattle about "The Pilgrim's Progress") etc.
Books showed me there were possibilities in life, that there were actually people like me living in a world I could not only aspire to but attain. Reading gave me hope. For me, it was the open door.