Poems create vivid pictures and tell stories by using language creatively. Readers enjoy the challenge of trying to understand the poet’s intention in writing a poem. A poem is a window into the poet’s ideas and feelings about issues happening during the time when it was written. Readers can look at the poem’s form and literary devices to see what the poet saw.【小题1】

First, follow your ears. If the true meaning is beyond your grasp, pay attention to the sound of it.【小题2】

Second, approach the poem as if you were an explorer in an unfamiliar landscape. Ask some basic questions about the poem. Who is talking? Who is being talked to?【小题3】This combination is often complex or even contradictory. As you slowly explore your surroundings, you will start to dig up clues that give you a greater understanding of the poem.

Third, if you find it hard to interpret the meaning of a poem at the moment, just have some patience.【小题4】Sometimes reading a poem can be a lifelong job.

【小题5】You might need to abandon logical thinking to discover its true inner beauty. Reading poetry will surely be enjoyable and let you perceive another level of meaning.

Reading Art: Art for Book Lovers is a celebration of an everyday object — the book, represented here in almost three hundred artworks from museums around the world. The image of the reader appears throughout history, in art made long before books as we now know them came into being. In artists’ representations of books and reading, we see moments of shared humanity that go beyond culture and time.

In this “book of books,” artworks are selected and arranged in a way that emphasizes these connections between different eras and cultures. We see scenes of children learning to read at home or at school, with the book as a focus for relations between the generations. Adults are portrayed (描绘) alone in many settings and poses —absorbed in a volume, deep in thought or lost in a moment of leisure. These scenes may have been painted hundreds of years ago, but they record moments we can all relate to.

Books themselves may be used symbolically in paintings to demonstrate the intellect (才智), wealth or faith of the subject. Before the wide use of the printing press, books were treasured objects and could be works of art in their own right. More recently, as books have become inexpensive or even throwaway, artists have used them as the raw material for artworks — transforming covers, pages or even complete volumes into paintings and sculptures.

Continued developments in communication technologies were once believed to make the printed page outdated. From a 21st-century point of view, the printed book is certainly ancient, but it remains as interactive as any battery-powered e-reader. To serve its function, a book must be activated by a user: the cover opened, the pages parted, the contents reviewed, perhaps notes written down or words underlined. And in contrast to our increasingly networked lives where the information we consume is monitored and tracked, a printed book still offers the chance of a wholly private, “off-line” activity.

Reading can be a social activity. Think of the people who belong to book groups. They choose books to read and then meet to discuss them. Now, the website BookCrossing.com turns the page on the traditional idea of a book group.

Members go on the site and register the books they own and would like to share. BookCrossing provides an identification number to stick inside the book. Then the person leaves it in a public place, hoping that the book will have an adventure, traveling far and wide with each new reader who finds it.

Bruce Pederson, the managing director of BookCrossing, says, “The two things that change your life are the people you meet and books you read. BookCrossing combines both.”

Members leave books on park benches and buses, in train stations and coffee shops. Whoever finds their book will go to the site and record where they found it.

People who find a book can also leave a journal entry describing what they thought of it. E-mails are then sent to the BookCrossing to keep them updated about where their books have been found. Bruce Peterson says the idea is for people not to be selfish by keeping a book to gather dust on a shelf at home.

BookCrossing is part of a trend among people who want to get back to the “real” and not the virtual(虚拟). The site now has more than one million members in more than one hundred thirty-five countries.