World Book Day | Wang Chezhi: Reading can increase people's self-worth

April 23 is World Book Day, which was established to encourage more people to read and write. Rapid changes in the medium seem to fundamentally change the way we access information. People from the way of reading physical books, gradually dispersed into more diversified and fragmented choices, "efficiency first" has become the criterion that everyone pursues, but there are still many people who choose to slow down in the "double speed" era, choose to enter the sea of books, and feel the truth of life, the miscellaneous of society, the beauty of logic, the purity of the mind and the power of speculation from reading.

Reading a book is like coming face to face with a writer; reading a book is to experience the life described in the book in the simplest way.

Today we have a conversation with Wang Chezhi about books, through which we will see the meaning of reading in their lives.

Wang Chezhi, born in 1994, is a poet who graduated from the Department of Chinese of Peking University in 2012 and has a Ph.D. in literature from Oxford University. He has won the 2019 5th Beijing Poetry Festival Annual Young Poet Award, the 1st New Poetics Award in 2020, the 1st Rapid Eye Poetry Award in 2020, and the 2021 Breakthrough Poetry Award • Annual Emerging Poet Award. He is the author of Nineteen Poems 19 POEMS (New York, 2018) and Lion Rock (Hainan, 2019, New Poetry Series, No. 23).

1) Hermann Hesse said, "No book in the world can bring you good luck, but they can make you quietly yourself." How do you think this sentence should be understood?

Wang Chezhi: I don't completely agree. Reading a lot of books will indeed bring good luck, such as those reference books or textbooks, at least to find a job. In addition, bad books can make people another person, maybe not what they want. If this sentence is roughly understood, it means that reading books can reshape and increase people's self-worth. However, choice is important.

2. What books have you been reading recently? Why choose it?

王彻之：Self-Translation in the Age of World Literature. 写论文。

3. What is your study like, and how much time do you spend reading in the study every day? How many books do you buy in a year? Can you sum up in one sentence why you like to read?

Wang Chezhi: I am now living in a solitary apartment, and the so-called study is the bookshelf. It doesn't cost much to buy a book a year, because most of them I go to find electronic versions. Reading is not a matter of liking or not, it is life, but also a livelihood.

4. If you have the opportunity to make friends with the characters in the book, who are you most looking forward to meeting?

Wang Chezhi: And Yuan Ming. This man has a good understanding of both poetry and cooking.

5, fast food culture prevailed in the era of big data, there is a good habit of reading is precious, so when did you start to read as a daily habit?

Wang Chezhi: Primary school. Because there is really no other entertainment activity that can be used by the brain except playing chess.

6. Nowadays, the way people obtain information is becoming more and more convenient, all kinds of fresh information are presented in our lives in an all-pervasive manner, and we have more and more ways to acquire knowledge and see the world, but at what moment do you think that reading is still irreplaceable?

Wang Chezhi: On social platforms, when some people start group insults at every turn, when rationality is only the yardstick of a few people at a certain point, when those students on the Internet have not yet formed their own values, they are coaxed by others. The more convenient the information, the more knowledge dries up.

7. "There are a thousand Hamlets in the eyes of a thousand readers." Whether a book is good or bad usually has no clear boundaries, and the key to choosing what book to read lies in self-awareness and judgment. What kind of books do you prefer to read in your daily life?

Wang Chezhi: I prefer to be intellectually original and can give me a different feeling in literary imagination.

8, some people think that reading should be large and complete, some people think that it should be small and specialized; some people think that reading should pursue speed and focus; some people think that books should be read slowly and carefully. How do you see these things? What is your reading habit?

Wang Chezhi: In the final analysis, it still depends on a person's occupation and positioning. Some for exams, some for work, some for self-cultivation, some for the sake of showing after tea and dinner, some purely for reading, and then at the end of the year, send a statistic to show off. I think it's okay, as long as it's good for me, whether the benefit is short-term or long-term. At first, I only read what I liked, including professional books, and now if I don't like it, I have to consider whether it is meaningful to me and is more utilitarian. But utilitarianization is not necessarily wrong, the key is to look at the understanding of knowledge itself.

9, some people say that after reading a book, they feel that they can't absorb any knowledge, and they don't know how to read it. Do you have any reading tips to share?

Wang Chezhi: You can write down the key points in the book and record them in a book. Many times a book is seventy percent nonsense, so reading books should also have a habit of prioritizing. The other is the help of second-hand literature. For example, reading Derrida may not understand very well some of his own narratives, which is okay, because to say that you fully understand is to brag. At this time, you must use the interpretation of others to help yourself think, and then choose the key content memory.

10. Now many people are aware of the importance of reading books, but they lament that they can't always read in, what do you think is the reason?

Wang Chezhi: Information dissemination is too convenient, fragmented short videos and microblogs, etc., and the interference with people is too great. Sometimes I can't see it, and this is something that everyone needs to reflect on.

11, improve the amount of reading is very important, but the reading content is more worthy of attention. And the number of books is huge, how do we choose the right book for ourselves?

Wang Chezhi: I suggest choosing an author who is higher than his own intellectual or literary attainment, but if he is an ordinary reader, the object he chooses at the beginning should not be too high. For example, if you have not read philosophy, don't buy Hegel at the beginning, that different language system will confuse you, or make you deviate. You can read Benjamin first, Strauss This readability is relatively strong. In addition, literary reading, try to read classics, read less novels by contemporary writers, and read poems selectively, because most of them are not worth spending that money.

12, the rapid development of the Internet is changing people's reading habits, many people are more inclined to read e-books, and dilute the reading demand for paper books, what do you think about this problem? What other advantages do you think paper books have?

Wang Chezhi: As I said just now, I read most of the electronic version. In my bones, I still like the feeling of reading in the paper version, which is a way of life. However, for specific tasks and work, I try to read the electronic version as much as possible, because it is very convenient to browse and find. The main advantage of a paper book is that it can give people a very down-to-earth and quiet feeling that I am reading the thing itself, similar to a ritual, which is incomparable to e-books. Of course, there is also a point, that is, it is not eye-catching.

13. The full name of World Book Day is "World Book and Copyright Day", in other words, not only to read more, but also to protect copyright. Regarding the protection of copyright, what do you think we can do in our daily lives?

Wang Chezhi: It is recommended that you do not buy pirated books, and you should also be wary of those small websites when looking for books on the Internet. Protecting copyright is protecting knowledge and respecting everyone's thinking and writing.

14. The book represents the author's thought activity and emotional outpouring, what is the book that has the greatest impact on you in your reading process? What's the story behind it?

Wang Chezhi: "Red and Black". When I was in elementary school, I knew for the first time that novels could still be written in this way, and the psychological description of people could be so introverted. At that time, it was mainly too idle on holidays.

15. With World Book Day approaching, can you recommend a few books to us?

Wang Chezhi: The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin, Poetic Botany, Omaros, The Five Suns of Mexico, Wilderness Guide, Lion Rock.

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