# books and people

By [raindrop](https://paragraph.com/@raindrop-2) · 2022-10-08

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"Books cannot be read unless they are borrowed", I have always liked this famous reading saying of the ancients. Because the words are subtle and true, and memorable. In our cultural tradition, there is a story about borrowing books. The most famous is Song Lian borrowing books. Song Lian, an important official in the Ming Dynasty, a generation of writers, wrote a lot, and compiled the "Yuan Shi". He was poor when he was young, and he read books by borrowing and copying books. The story can be read on "Disciple Rules". For borrowing books, there are many stories of people who have come from the era of shortage economy and book shortage. At that time my family was very poor, and sometimes it was a problem to eat, and books were absolutely unaffordable. My mother loves to read and can only borrow it from the county library. I followed behind and watched Kong and read a little. My mother has only one library card, and can only borrow one book at a time. The loan period is very tight. For this reason, many books were returned after I only read half of them. Sometimes I also borrow from classmates, although the loan period is tight, because I enjoy it alone, I still have the feeling of secretly having fun. In the 1970s, I was jumping in line in a rural village in Guangxi. The educated youth would go to villages and villages from time to time to borrow books from each other. It was common for a good-looking book to be passed on in five or six villages. Educated youths read idle books to kill the lonely time. At that time, we liked to say the phrase "books cannot be read without borrowing", but we didn't know where it came from. It seems that what I wanted to express at the time was: borrowing books is reasonable, not borrowing is wrong. This is of course not the original intention of this statement.

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The famous saying "books cannot be read without borrowing" comes from Yuan Mei (Zicai), a poet and poet in the Qing Dynasty. Yuan Mei, a native of Hangzhou, has lived in my hometown of Nanjing for 50 years. Mr. Suiyuan recounted his experience and thoughts on reading in his famous essay "Huang Sheng's Books on Borrowing Books". He said that when he was young, his family was poor and had no money to buy books. The neighbors had a large collection of books, so he was rejected when he went to borrow them. This made him more and more interested in books, and he would study tirelessly after occasionally borrowing books from other places. Later, when he became an official and became a magistrate, he had enough salary to buy books, and his family's collection of books became more and more abundant, but it was too late to read them. In this regard, Mr. Suiyuan was deeply touched, and said to Huang Sheng, who came to borrow books: books cannot be read unless they are borrowed. All in all, private borrowing is fun. It's just that such simple and interesting things are rare now, and the relationship between people is much more reserved than it was back then. In modern society, the way people borrow books is mainly library services, and the business term is borrowing. At present, the lending of public libraries is attracting more and more attention of the society. In recent years, attention has been paid to the construction of public libraries, and government funding has increased a lot. People all hope that public libraries will play an active role in reading for all. But as far as we know, many urban public libraries are now working hard and putting a lot of thought into serving readers, but there are still many libraries that have not been embarrassed or embarrassed to carry out their lending business. unknown.

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*Originally published on [raindrop](https://paragraph.com/@raindrop-2/books-and-people)*