Touch the book

(GLO)- I have had the habit of reading books since I was a child. Wherever I go or whatever I do, I bring books with me. On the North-South train or on a long bus trip, in my backpack there are always a few newly bought or half-read books.

In the past, next to my house was a teacher's family. Every weekend afternoon, I often went to his house to cherish the books neatly arranged on the shelves, on the shelves; to touch the lines of words, the beautiful images or to think and fly with dreams. On the low table placed on the porch, next to the tea set, there were always a few books that he marked the page he had just read with a shiny chicken feather.

Students of Dak Doa Town Primary School No. 1 read books in the school yard. Photo: Nguyen Vo

After school hours or playing and flying kites with friends in the fields, perhaps the teacher's house steps were the sky of my childhood. That place planted in my mind many useful and interesting things. I read many kinds of books, from ancient to modern, from domestic stories to world civilizations. I read without getting bored. The teacher was very happy and kept praising when there was a child who loved to read books like me. Many days, he read books and talked with me. His stories often came out of the pages of books, from ancient times of our country or of a country on the other side of the hemisphere. Once he pondered philosophically: Many books are not simply read to gain more knowledge but also to love and cherish. The lines in the books contain many things that make us admire and seek.

I understood what the teacher said. I knew how to immerse myself in the poems and the beautiful prose. I knew how to feel sad and choked up before the fate that women in feudal times had to endure. I walked with the dawn in the vast steppe, looking up at the maple leaves changing color in the distant land of Russia. I knew my heart was pounding before the figure and misfortune of the hunchback in Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris...

Touching a book, a new horizon will open up. Touching a book, aspirations will be formed. Understanding books cannot be done in a day or two but is a long process of empathy, emotion and living with what books bring. Starting with the lullabies of grandmothers and mothers, folk poems convey messages about love and about human relations. The pages of elementary school textbooks gave me my first lessons about the world of childhood, about the mystery of nature. I was fascinated and silent when opening a literature book in 6th grade. The image of Ms. Su being tied up and beaten... Reading the words, my eyes were filled with pain for my homeland Hon Dat. I fell in love with literature from pages like that.

Reading books is a way to nourish the soul. Illustration: Phuong Duyen

Have you ever felt your heart flutter when your eyes touched a book? I think many people have. Because books contain so many good and strange things; books reveal our frustrations and origins. We look into books to understand ourselves, others and life better. There is an anecdote that is still passed down, in a foreign country, a thief sneaked into a writer's house and mistakenly took a manuscript. What he read made the thief awaken and reform. Or the owner of a famous farm system in Hanoi confided: "The short story "The Season of Peanuts" by writer Nguyen Khai gave me the ideas to reform and become a human being. I am very grateful to that writer". Only then do we know that books also have souls, have voices that speak with vague but real emotions, with profound but close and sincere implications. Books help us purify our souls, wash away negative thoughts, and move towards good and kind things. Books have a latent power, hidden under layers of polysemous language. People who love books will discover and understand books more.

Everything eventually fades into the past, is erased, forgotten, but books are not. In the library or bookshelf of every family, somewhere, books are still waiting for people to touch. Every time I go back to my hometown, I often go to my teacher's house even though he passed away a few years ago. Standing silently next to the neatly arranged pile of books, I remember what he said. Gently touching the old books I had read, my heart aches.

Source: https://baogialai.com.vn/cham-vao-sach-post326365.html