大学英语综合教程 第一册 unit 1b

[04:26.76]"You tell me,"he said, "Next week."
[04:30.60]I started after supper,sitting outdoors on an uncomfortable kitchen chair.
[04:36.38](3)Within a few pages,the yard,the summer,disappeared,
[04:42.23]and I was plunged into the aching tragedy of the Holocaust,
[04:46.59]the extraordinary clash of good,represented by one decent man,and evil.
[04:53.51]Translated from French,the language was elegant,simple,impossible to resist.
[05:00.56]When the evening light finally failed I moved inside,read all through the night
[05:07.28]To this day,thirty years later,I vividly remember the experience.
[05:14.51]It was my first voluntary encounter with world literature,
[05:19.16]and I was stunned by the concentrated power a novel could contain.
[05:24.13]I lacked the vocabulary,however,
[05:26.92]to translate my feelings into words,so the nest week,
[05:31.39]when Mr.Balloul asked, "Well?"I only replied, "It was good."
[05:37.53]"Keep it,then,"he said."Shall I suggest another?"
[05:41.42]I nodded,and was presented with the paperback edition of Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa
[05:49.13]To make two long stories short,
[05:52.55]Mr.Ballou never paid me a cent for cutting his grass that year or the next,
[05:59.03]but for fifteen years I taught anthropology at Dartmouth College.
[06:04.46]Summer reading was not the innocent entertainment I had assumed it to be,not a light-hearted
[06:11.77]instantly forgettable escape in a hammock
[06:15.12](though I have since enjoyed many of those,too)
[06:18.59]A book,if it arrives before you at the right moment,in the proper season,
[06:24.44]at an interval in the daily business of things,
[06:28.55]will change the course of all that follows.