Reading helps thinking. A man who doesn't care to read actually undergoes intellectual fasting.

In contrast, Francis Bacon wrote: "Reading maketh a full man." But there is reading and more reading. If we read by just running our eyes quickly along a page of print, we would be shocking the Ancients. Few people in Antiquity knew how to read, a few possessed the bricks, stones or rolls for reading. For the young students of ancient Greece, these reading materials were a treasure in their hands.

QUESTIONS:
1. How do modern people like us treat our books (a treasure in our hands)? 2. How much easier is it today to carry around and read books? Or would we rather carry our cellphone?

Reading aloud was the rule among the ancients. This was a long custom even in private reading, and the rustic who moves his lips as he read is keeping up a tradition. It was told that Saint Ambrose once said that he tried old age to stop reading" because his throat as affected."

QUESTION:
1. Students in lower grades read aloud and even use their finger to guide their eyes while reading. Comment on why this is so.

Explain.

2. Is this (oral reading) an effective way to read?

The philosopher Spinoza had less than 60 books. Kant had about 300, but most of them were about travel. From necessity, people limited their collection to good books.

QUESTION: 1. Jose Rizal and Andres Bonifacio had their private collection of books. Why were they inclined to keep books? 2. Not having many books, how come there were geniuses among the Ancients?

In sixties, eleven thousand books were published annually in France compared with about seventy books during the days of King LOUIS XIV."Make your choice," the guilty publishers would say."Know what you want!"..

1. How would you assess this formidable inroad of printed things? 2. Will readingdaily newspapers and weekly magazines in addition to light novelsdespoil our personality? Is there too much commercialism in publications? Explain.

Never read: always study as an artist studies a beautiful face. Read as you please and fly or skip passages as you please. Be like an anxious cyclist who has a map in his hands anxious to find the way to his destination. As we read with intense curiosity let us not plod with attention to mere words. Attention to words never produces thoughts. A book is a prompter, and so why read a whole page if two lines give you a sufficient idea of it? QUESTIONS: 1. Do these suggestions apply to all kinds of books? 2. How about masterpieces, how are they equal to works of arts? 3. How about reading current materials (in newspaper, magazines, pocket books, the internet) how can we apply selective reading in life?