Matthew Kneale is the award-winning author of fiction and non-fiction, including English passengers, which won the Whitbread Book Award. He shares the books that have changed his life.

As a child I loved the Tintin books — for their adventures, their characters and their stylish illustrations. Though Hergé visited almost none of the faraway places he drew, he captured (捕捉) them perfectly. His images, whether of Peru, Arabia, India or China, stayed with me and later, when I became a keen traveler, Tintin’s destinations were the places that I most wanted to reach. I never saw them all, needless to say, but I got to quite a few.

This was another book I loved as a child — the story of a boy who is bored staying with his grandparents, when he runs into Stig, a friendly Stone Age man. When my father read it to my sister and me, I was already fascinated by history and I loved the way the book captured the mystery of our distant, unrecorded past. Its charm stayed with me and much later I spent many a weekend driving around Britain, getting lost on small country roads, looking for prehistoric tombs and stone circles. There’s something breathtaking about these places, which are often in extraordinary locations.

When I first saw Rome, aged eight, I was amazed by the city’s layers of history and this same magic led me to come and live here, 20 years ago. I first read I Claudius as a teenager and was attracted by the story of friendly, stammering, ridiculed Claudius, who grows up in the vipers’ nest of Rome’s imperial family and who, against all the odds, as his relatives destroy one another, survives and rises. Graves, a fine scholar, has a talent for making the past spring to life, in all its nastiness and wonder. In my own writing, fiction and non-fiction, I’ve tried to follow his example — to make history shocked, as it should do.

Despite rising education levels, Americans of every age are reading less and less for pleasure these days, according to an analysis by the National Endowment for the Arts. The decline(下降) could have bad effects as people tune out books, tune in popular culture and become less socially engaged.

“We’ve got a public culture which is almost entirely commercial(商业化) and novelty-driven (追新),” says NEA chairman Dana Gioia. “I think it’s letting the nation down.”

The study gathers years of data on Americans’ reading habits and finds that, at every age group, we’re reading less.

Most of the data have appeared in private, government and university surveys, but today’s report is the first to combine them into a single portrait. It suggests that the demands of school, work and family and the decisive advantage of other forms of entertainment have caused the decline in reading for millions of Americans.

·Only 38% of adults in 2006 said they had spent time reading a book for pleasure.

·65% of college freshmen in 2005 said they read little or nothing for pleasure.

·30% of 13-year-olds in 2004 said they read for fun “almost every day,” down from 35% in 1984.

According to Gioia, a poet, the decline is probably the single most important social issue in the United States today. The findings should be a wake-up call to educators to change the way they teach literature at every level. It was once believed that if someone went to college, they would become a lifelong reader. What we’re seeing right now is that we’re no longer producing readers. We’re producing B.A.s and M.A.s and Ph.D.s.

Gioia also wants main media to wake up to how they can promote good books in many ways. He notes that when a character in the 1994 film Four Weddings and a Funeral recited a few lines of W. H. Auden’s poem Funeral Blues, the poet briefly became a best seller.

Four Best Classic Books for You to Read

If you’ve always wanted to tackle the classics but never known where to begin, we’ve got you covered. We’ve selected four best classic books for you to read.

The Man Who Would Be King by Rudyard Kipling

This short novel tells the story of two British men visiting India under Britain’s control. The men trick their way to a remote region where one of them comes to be respected as King. A tale warning against letting things go to your head, this funny story has been made into a classic film starring Michael Caine and Sean Connery.

Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie

Born in the first hour of India’s independence, Saleem Sinai is gifted with the power of an extraordinary sense of smell. He soon discovers that there are 1, 001 others with similar abilities, who can help him build a new India. The winner of the Booker prize in 1981, Salman Rushdie’s groundbreaking novel is a great achievement of magical realism. This great success was followed by his another novel Shame (1983).

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

If you’re not familiar with Dickens, his evergreen Christmastime classic is the perfect introduction. It’s a slim 104-page book — a true Christmas surprise from an author with a tendency towards the tome (大部头书) like his Great Expectations, which is another classic! It’s the perfect book for you to read in winter just when you want to feel that warm holiday atmosphere.

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers

Meet John Singer, a deaf and mute (哑的) man who sits in the same café every day. Here, in the deep American South of the 1930s, John meets various kinds of people and acts as the silent and kind keeper of their stories — right up until an unforgettable ending that will blow you away. It’s hard to believe McCullers was only 23 when she wrote this classic.