买书易，读书难？

“买书如山倒，读书如抽丝”已经成为越来越多现代人的“阅读病”。FT副主编Alice Fishburn给自己订下戒律：除工作和人情需要外，2014年不买新书。这对治疗“阅读病”有效吗？

测试中可能遇到的词汇和知识：

heteronormative 异性恋的

peter out 逐渐消失

clog up 堵塞

forlornly 孤苦伶仃地

jostle 拥挤、争夺

hydra 九头蛇，喻难以根除之祸害

jettison 废弃

阅读即将开始，建议您计算一下阅读整篇文章所用时间，并对照我们在文章最后给出的参考值来估算您的阅读速度。

Shelf improvement

By Alice Fishburn

In 2013, Nielsen data show we bought 323 million books. Many of them appear to be on my bedside table

* * *

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I do not have a good track record with New Year’s resolutions. But this summer, for probably the very first time, one of my pledges is still going strong. I have not bought a single book since last December.

It was as I tried to squeeze all 784 pages of Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch – my final purchase of 2013 – on to an already overcrowded bookshelf that I realised I had a problem. Piles of books were all over the house, many of them unread. There were unopened political doorstops; texts from the undergraduate canon with embarrassing student notes on 10 pages – “heteronormative cliché!” was a particular favourite – before my attention petered out; stacks of classics consigned to the “one day when I have time” category. Clearly my supply and demand assessments were way, way off.

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And so the pact began. My rules were simple. Books could be accepted as gifts or used when needed for work. They could be purchased for others, but not as a backhanded way of smuggling them into my own library. My fellow Brits may have spent £2.2bn on books in 2013 but I was no longer going to be one of them. Every page I turned in 2014 had to come from those already inside my house.

Imposing artificial restrictions to create some semblance of order on the stuff that clogs up our lives is nothing new. I’d even attempted it before with some success: vowing to use up every last bar of novelty soap and oddly scented bottle of moisturiser before shelling out for new ones. But I found that cleanliness is a lot easier to manage than literary predilection.

When it comes to possessions, things are made worse by the fact that my generation awkwardly straddles a divide. Old enough to remember the mix tape but young enough to be digital natives, we have managed to accumulate in both camps. Box sets sit forlornly by our televisions as we click through the almost infinite offerings of Netflix. Photo albums jostle for space while we download image after image on to our laptops. Even among the most fanatical technophiles, it is rare to go into a house with not a single book in sight.

Enter ever more elaborate systems of management. When it comes to literature, many book lovers curate the deluge of material that surrounds them. Some plough their way through one particular author or read exclusively about the Middle East or Victorian statesmen. Others organise their shelves by spine colour or religiously revisit the same five favourites annually. My new tactic of reading only what I already own turns out not to be new at all: Susan Hill wrote a whole book on the subject, Howards End is on the Landing, in 2009. (For obvious reasons, I haven’t been able to buy it.)

But coping strategies often dissolve in the face of temptation. And temptation is everywhere. There is always another review, recommendation or must-read list. Despite the habitual gloom that surrounds publishers, sales and our reading habits, there is also no shortage of material. A recent study by the International Publishers Association showed that the UK published more new titles and re-editions per person in 2012 than any other country. In 2013, Nielsen data show we bought 323 million books.

Many of them appear to be on my bedside table. There is always the decluttering option of the ebook, which accounted for a quarter of books bought in the UK last year. But an over-crammed and under-read Kindle can be as guilt-inducing as a buckling shelf. Then there is the hydra that is online reading. Chop off the head of one must-click article and there are immediately five more links clamouring in its place. Gone are the days when you could tick anything off your reading list completely: the internet is the gift that won’t stop giving.

. . .

And so the fightback begins.

For me, strategy piled on top of strategy as I started to alternate first fiction and non-fiction, then locations and periods. I focused on the uncracked spines, only heading for an old favourite when the novelty got too much. A typical pattern consisted of Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter (an undergraduate casualty), followed by Ted Sorensen’s memoirs (purchased summer 2009 for holiday, jettisoned as too heavy for suitcase) and then Sense and Sensibility (much better the second time around).

Seven months in, I’ve probably got through about 20 previously neglected books. The bank account is a little healthier, the shelves under no additional strain and my sense of guilt considerably smaller. Next year I may even tackle my wardrobe. And the local bookseller has nothing to worry about. Five months to go and I’ll be knocking down his door. Unless someone wants to give me the new JK Rowling?

请根据你所读到的文章内容，完成以下自测题目：

1. Why hasn’t the author bought any book since last December?

a. Because she doesn’t have money.

b. Because she is not interested in reading.

c. Because she already has too many.

2. What is her tactic of coping with so many unread books?

a. Purchase more books.

b. Read only what she has.

c. Hand out the books to friends.

3. Why does the author describe online reading as “hydra”?

a. Because you could tick everything off your reading list completely online.

b. Because the Internet is always giving you new articles to read.

c. Because there are too many ads on the Internet which you can’t avoid.

4. Which one of the following statements is true according to the author?

a. People these days don’t want to buy new books anymore.

b. British people prefer surfing on the Internet rather than reading books.

c. The author feels better when she started to practice her new reading tactic.

[1] 答案c. Because she already has too many.

解释：全文主旨在于如何面对“买书如山倒，读书如抽丝”的困境，因此作者决定不买新书是因为她已经拥有太多书，而很多还没读。

[2] 答案a. Purchase more books.

解释：文章第三段说明作者的策略是只接受作为礼物的新书和为工作、朋友买书，除此之外，自己不再买新书。

[3] 答案b. Because the Internet is always giving you new articles to read.

解释：文章倒数第四段将在线阅读比作hydra，因为网络上有无穷无尽的延伸阅读，关掉一个会冒出五个，就像九头蛇一样砍掉一只头会冒出更多。

[4] 答案c. The author feels better when she started to practice her new reading tactic.

解释：根据文意，英国人去年共买了约3亿本书，所以人们并没有不愿买新书，也未提及英国人更爱网上阅读。从文末可知，作者克制买新书后，读了不少已有的书，省了钱，歉疚感也更小了。