The following article is from the Grass Heron Club, written by Wang Qiang
March is reading day.
Winter is gone, and everything is alive. Giving yourself the time you enjoy to read a good book, and talking to giants out of the limits of time and space, is a kind of satisfaction and a kind of luck.
Today's Yangtze River reading we do not read books, but to explore how to choose a good book. Sharing the thoughts of Wang Qiang, co-founder of Zhen Fund and an alumnus of the 4th Phase of the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business Entrepreneur and Scholar Program, on reading books, I hope to inspire you.
Share | Wang Qiang
Source | Grass Heron Club
01 Reading must read the classics
We are now facing fast, facing more, facing shallow, such a basic reading atmosphere, or habit, so how did we as a reader be born? How do you get back to life?
Books don't necessarily read a lot, but after reading them, they will have a nuclear fission in your actual life, which is very, very important.
I think Chinese's desire to learn now is very strong, because there is a strong desire to succeed behind them, pushing them to have to read. But it seems like the more you read, the closer you get to success. In my opinion, on the contrary, the more you read, you may be overwhelmed by all kinds of things, information, and even noise, and lose the direction of your judgment and the path to success.
In this case, my personal experience is that after reading a book, if you are not ready to pick it up again, it proves that the book has almost no value or meaning to you.
Mr. Qian Zhongshu has a definition of classics, the so-called classics have two characteristics, one is readability, one is re-readable, or must be able to re-read sex. Everyone thinks that the reason why a book is a good book is that it is easy to read and readable.
But people forget another thing, if a book, although it is easy to read, although it can be read, but can not be read again, the book itself is not a real book, or for you, is not a book that can have value for your life, for your life.
So in the face of a lot of information, the amount of information, everyone pursues readability, entertainment, and even says that reading is not for anything, or for entertainment, reading when bored, this is the worst choice.
Boring reading makes you more bored, you might as well do something else. Bored why should you read? It is precisely because life becomes not boring, only books can make the boring things in our reality produce things that are not in reality, which is what books can create for us.
02 The best state for the ideal reader
You talk to people around you about any book, and no one doesn't know it, because everyone already knows a rough idea from the Internet, and even after listening to a lecture, they end the reading of the book.
This kind of fastness, rather than saying that you are walking into knowledge and approaching knowledge, it is better to say that you are wasting your life. Do anything, if you only understand a name, do not go into it, do not learn to be slow, in the long run is not a win.
As far as reading is concerned, only slowness can really turn words into something powerful, or get the power that words should give you.
Why do people read?
We don't care what the carrier of reading is now, electronic reading, paper reading, but no matter what, reading will never die. Why? Because this is the most effective, the most convenient, one of the basic tools for constructing the world. If we can enter reading with such a state, then our book really opens up what reading expects.
Everyone knows Proust, and I don't know how many people have read his seven-volume novel, Remembrance of a Time like Water. If you haven't read it, you're going to turn a few pages a day, turn a few pages a day, stay at least for a while every day, stay two minutes, stick to it every day, and almost finish it in two years, and if you can really do that, you may really be able to enter a realm as a reader.
I read Proust for 30 years, probably five times. In my luggage, there will always be an English translation, compared to its French text. Why? Because it has two functions: it is good text, and it is best to kill time.
Because you can't read, you can't sleep if you can't read, what are you talking about? Why? How to say it for half a day is not clear, I have a problem or it has a problem? Frequent conversations with the author will keep you alert.
But if you want to sleep, very effectively, after reading three pages and not understanding a word, faster than sleeping pills, because the word itself is black, itself is your melatonin, so you fall asleep.
But after reading it, you will know that the original construction of these worlds, the cornerstones and bricks and tiles of the original are like this, and the power of the original words is accumulated in this way.
Before Proust wrote the novel "Remembrance of the Watery Years", he wrote an autobiographical novel, which he originally intended to write 1,000 pages, but when he wrote more than 200 pages, he got stuck. Unable to find out how to move forward, he spotted the British cultural critic Ruskin, who decided to start perusing Ruskin. It took him eight years to read this carefully, and he read all of Ruskin's writings at that time several times.
When Proust read Ruskin and translated, he was a reader—the ideal reader in my mind the most important thing to do. Both of them were small, but he did two things, which are rare in the history of translation in the world. For these two small works, he made the translator's preface and preface, which accounted for almost one-third of the original work, and these two prefaces later became the classic works of Proust's commentary.
Even more perverted was his annotation, which he feared was that the French did not quite understand the thing, and that he, as a reader, was going to annotate it. If you are going to find a French translation, you will find that the amount of notes added is almost the same as the original text. Sometimes a note goes two pages.
Why? When he explained this thing, Proust actually put everything from Shakespeare's time to Rabelais in France, and he, as a reader, thought that the word Ruskin could only be explained by putting this note on this place, which was the best state for an ideal reader.
It is equivalent to saying that although you are reading a book, although you are reading a writer for eight years, in fact, his whole world is constructed, which is the most ideal thing. When I say read it again, I actually mean this.
When you walk into a book you've read, can you pour out ten more books you've read? True books are alive, and the relationship that true readers and authors should have is to talk to each other, appreciate each other, revere each other, and challenge each other. Without this state, this book has nothing to do with you.
So Proust quotes a quote from Descartes:
“
Reading all the good books is like talking to the most admirable people of the past century, who are the authors of the books.
”
03 What is a first-class work?
In my opinion, first, if the creator is thinking about something that is not what we need right now, then I am more at ease. Because the structure, space, and time he thinks about is long enough, the quality of the injection, the quality of life, the quality of observation, the depth of his vision and his concentration are enough to make me awe-inspired.
Second, the world he presents is not familiar to me. If I'm familiar with it, present it again with it, I'm wasting my time. Although my writing may not be as good as his, and I am not good at expressing it, I have already experienced it, and it is not right for you to let me re-experience what I have experienced.
Proust said that an author should present things that you feel the master has felt, but he does not directly describe them. In this case, my first-class, at least this standard.
Third, look at how pure the uniqueness of his thoughts is. If you look at Chinese, what do I think a first-class book is? It is not those works that were influenced by Western studies after the Republic of China and sorted out the national history through the methodology of Western studies. I think there is no doubt that the first-class book is pre-Qin, the pre-Qin thought is super-first-class, it was born without any influence, this is the original ecology of thought.
If I want to understand Confucius through Feng Youlan's thought, this is not first-class. Confucius was first-class, because he talked with students in Tiantou, tweeted, more than a hundred words, and talked about a paragraph every day to get knowledge sharing. Give him a few bacon, and that's knowledge payment.
In the case of our constant persecution, this first-class can play the most important role in your thinking process, in the knowledge structure, and in the process of finally leading to wisdom. Otherwise, it doesn't matter how much you read. Books without choice will really ruin you, ruin your time, ruin your life, it is better not to read.