Only Time Will Tell

I have just finished reading ‘Only Time Will Tell’ by Jeffrey Archer. It is the first book in the Clifton Chronicles. I believe there are five volumes in all.

The book is easy to read and the plot moves along at a quick, and smooth pace, with twists typical of Jeffrey Archer’s style.

Briefly, it is a tale of how a poor boy from the Bristol Backstreets rise to high society – how, along the way family secrets were reveal, and life changing decisions had to be made. Saying anymore would be revealing the story. I will not spoil it here, in case you want to read the book.

The story continues in ‘The Sins of the Father’. However, this is a standalone book too, meaning if you do not read the following book, it is all right too. But chances are, you will want to.

Reading - Quotes

A peasant that reads is a prince in waiting. - Walter Mosley

Education has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading. - G. M. Trevelyan

He that loves reading has everything within his reach. - William Godwin

I think you can tell when you meet someone whether they read novels. There’s some hollowness if they don’t. - Philip Hensher

If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write. - Stephen King

In our daily lives, where we’re bombarded by the fake and the trivial, reading serves as a way to stop, shut out the noise of the world, and try to grab hold of something real, no matter how small. - Maureen Corrigan

Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one’s hand. - Ezra Pound

Once you learn to read, you will be forever free. - Frederick Douglass

Read. Read all the time. Read as a matter of principle, as a matter of self-respect. Read as a nourishing staple of life. - David McCullough

Reading ... the best state possible in which to keep absolute loneliness at bay. - William Styron

Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours. - John Locke

Reading makes a full Man, Meditation a profound Man, Discourse a clear Man. - Benjamin Franklin

Reading supplies bread for imagination to feed on and bones for it to chew on. - Alex Osborn

Stories you read when you’re the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them or what the story was called. Sometimes you’ll forget precisely what happened, but if a story touches you it will stay with you, haunting the places in your mind that you rarely ever visit. - Neil Gaiman

The ability to read awoke inside of me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive. - Malcom X

The first lesson reading teaches is how to be alone. - Jonathan Franzen

The man who has not the habit of reading is imprisoned in his immediate world. - Lin YuTang

The more imagination the reader has ... the more he will do for himself. He will, at a mere hint from the author, flood wretched material with suggestion and never guess that he is himself chiefly making what he enjoys. - C. S. Lewis

The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go. - Dr. Seuss

To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark. - Victor Hugo

What is reading but silent conversation. - Walter Savage Landor

Brain Function 'boosted for days after reading a novel'

The Independent - Tuesday 31 December 2013

Reading a gripping novel causes biological changes in the brain which last for days as the mind is transported into the body of the protagonist

Being pulled into the world of a gripping novel can trigger actual, measurable changes in the brain that linger for at least five days after reading, scientists have said.

The new research, carried out at Emory University in the US, found that reading a good book may cause heightened connectivity in the brain and neurological changes that persist in a similar way to muscle memory.

The changes were registered in the left temporal cortex, an area of the brain associated with receptivity for language, as well as the the primary sensory motor region of the brain.

Neurons of this region have been associated with tricking the mind into thinking it is doing something it is not, a phenomenon known as grounded cognition - for example, just thinking about running, can activate the neurons associated with the physical act of running.

“The neural changes that we found associated with physical sensation and movement systems suggest that reading a novel can transport you into the body of the protagonist,” said neuroscientist Professor Gregory Berns, lead author of the study.

“We already knew that good stories can put you in someone else’s shoes in a figurative sense. Now we’re seeing that something may also be happening biologically.”

21 students took part in the study, with all participants reading the same book -  Pompeii, a 2003 thriller by Robert Harris, which was chosen for its page turning plot.

“The story follows a protagonist, who is outside the city of Pompeii and notices steam and strange things happening around the volcano,” said Prof Berns. “It depicts true events in a fictional and dramatic way. It was important to us that the book had a strong narrative line.”

Over 19 days the students read a portion of the book in the evening then had fMRI scans the following morning. Once the book was finished, their brains were scanned for five days after.

The neurological changes were found to have continued for all the five days after finishing, proving that the impact was not just an immediate reaction but has a lasting influence.

“Even though the participants were not actually reading the novel while they were in the scanner, they retained this heightened connectivity,” added Prof Berns. “We call that a ‘shadow activity,’ almost like a muscle memory.”

Reading

Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me some thing to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievable healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it’s a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it’s a way of making contact with someone else’s imagination after a day that’s all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss. - Nora Ephron

Reading - Quotes

Reading - one of the joys of my life. 

Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are. - Mason Cooley

The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – that you’d thought special, particular to you. And here It is, set down by someone else, a person you’ve ever met, maybe even someone long dead. And it’s as if a hand has come out, and taken yours. - Alan  Bennett

No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting. - Mary Wortley Montagu 

A man ought to read just as inclination leads him, for what he reads as a task will do him little good. - Samuel Johnson 

No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance. - Confucius

Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you. - Harold Bloom

Reading is a means of thinking with another person’s mind; it forces you to stretch your own. - Charles Scribner Jr. 

Reading is associated with our ability to understand what other people are thinking and feeling. It is theoretically possible that socially awkward people might become more socially adept it they just read more. - Raymond Mar

A short clear message is always better than a thick report because it is more likely to be read and understood. - Unknown

To read fast is as bad as to eat in a hurry. - Vilhelm Ekelund

Reading - Quotes

'Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

The habit of reading is the only one I know in which there is no alloy. It lasts when all other pleasures fade. It will be there to support you when all other resources are gone. It will be present to you when the energies of your body have fallen away from you. It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live. - Anthony Trollope

I suppose every old scholar has had the experience of reading something in a book which was significant to him, but which he could never find again. Sure he is that he read it there, but no one else ever read it, nor can he find it again, though he buy the book and ransack every page. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Reading is essential for growth. It gives a whole dimension to our lives. It has been so since the first reading material was made available to the masses. It helps us to know and understand each other and our world better, to see beneath exteriors, to wipe out boundaries and distances. - Leo Buscaglia

The time to read is any time: no apparatus, no appointment of time and place, is necessary. It is the only art which can be practiced at any hour of the day or night, whenever the time and inclination comes, that is your time for reading; in joy or sorrow, health or illness. - Holbrook Jackson

In a real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read. It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish. - S. I. Hayakawa

Good literature continually read for pleasure must, let us hope, do some good to the reader: must quicken his perception though dull, and sharpen his discrimination though blunt, and mellow the rawness of his personal opinions. - A. E. Housman

Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting. - Aldous Huxley

When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Read, read, read. Read everything - trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. - William Faulkner

The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination. - Elizabeth Hardwick

Then I thought of reading - the nice and subtle happiness of reading ... this joy not dulled by age, this polite and unpunishable vice, this selfish, serene, lifelong intoxication. - Logan Pearsall Smith

Resolve to edge in a little reading every day, if it is but a single sentence. If you gain fifteen minutes a day, it will make itself felt at the end of the year. - Horace Mann

It is better to read one poem a hundred times and keep it in your heart, than to read a hundred poems and remember them not at all. - Unknown

Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider. - Francis Bacon

When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before. - Cliff Fadiman

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain

To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life. - William Somerset Maugham

The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries. - Rene Descartes

To read a writer is for me not merely to get an idea of what he says, but to go off with him and travel in his company. - Andre Gide

Of all the diversions of life, there is none so proper to fill up its empty spaces as the reading of useful and entertaining authors. - David Viscott

Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more. - Elizabeth Hardwick

In science, read, by preference, the newest works; in literature, the oldest. - Edward Bulwer-Lytton

I have never known any distress that an hour's reading did not relieve. - Charles De Montesquieu

Don't just read the easy stuff. You may be entertained by it, but you will never grow from it. - Jim Rohn

The one thing I regret is that I will never have time to read all the books I want to read. - Francoise Sagan

Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else's head instead of with one's own. - Arthur Schopenhauer

I read my eyes out and can't read half enough. . . . The more one reads the more one sees we have to read. - John Adams

The mere brute pleasure of reading – the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing. - Lord Chesterfield

If you believe everything you read, you had better not read. - Unknown

Anyone who can read, can learn to read deeply and thus live more fully. - Norman Cousins

No one can read with profit that which he cannot learn to read with pleasure. - Thomas Hardy

It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything. - Joseph Brodsky

Reading without reflecting is like eating without digesting. - Edmund Burke

Read as you taste fruit or savor wine, or enjoy friendship, love or life. - George Herbert

One must be a wise reader to quote wisely and well. - Amos Bronson Alcott

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. - Sir Richard Steele

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life. - Joseph Addison

No two persons ever read the same book. - Edmund Wilson

I am a part of everything that I have read. - John Kieran

Your library is your portrait. - Holbrook Jackson

Reading

I discovered the joy of reading during my young tender years. Till this day, reading remains my favourite past time. 

The following article on Reading is another of those articles which I came across ages ago. It is a well thought out article expounding the benefits of reading. Worth a read although you may find it a bit long. 

On reading profitably 

There are many different motives for reading. We may seek knowledge, relaxation, comfort, background, inspiration, or something that will enable us to compose all these into a way of life. 

The accumulated factual knowledge of the past few hundred generations of human beings is too great to be acquired through experience in a lifetime. We must take it vicariously from books. Books push out the boundaries of our ignorance, factually into the past and speculatively into the future. 

Consider this – we have only three ways of evaluating human existence: the study of self, which is the most dangerous and most difficult method, though often the most fruitful; the observation of our fellow men, who may hide their most revealing secrets from us; and books, which, with all their errors of perspective and judgment, are constant, detailed and always at our beck and call. 

It is interesting and useful to read how crises similar to our own in form, though perhaps not in magnitude, were handled by our predecessors. Books unroll the great scroll of history so that things that are remote in time and place help us to judge things that are near at hand today. 

Reading is one of the most effective means of getting away from disturbing and unalterable circumstances. Intimate association with noble works, literary, philosophic, artistic, is a promoter of thought, a refuge from almost all the miseries of life. 

Books are good for us because they tend to shake us up. Our environment is confusing. It is made up of a angle of complicated notions, in the midst of which individuals are inclined to sit apathetically. Scientific date fall upon us every day until we suffocate with uncoordinated facts; our minds are overwhelmed with discoveries which we do not understand and therefore fear. 

What we find in books can make us look again at things we have taken for granted, and question them; it can arouse us to appreciate once more the ideas and ideals that are being stifled under the flow of technical marvels. If a book moves us to thought, even to angry thought, the chances are that it is doing us a good turn. 

Consider also the benefit of good reading to the person who seeks ability in self-expression. The woman who wishes to excel in conversation and the man who must make his letters and orders clear: both these need to read wisely. 

From whence come the quotations we run across continually in conversation, correspondence, public addresses and articles? 

We are not interested in reading as critics, but as humans beings in search of some human values. If a book gives you the feeling that you are being inspired, informed, helped, or entertained, never mind what anybody else says about it, it is good. 

Reading furnishes the tools and material to take us out of blind-alley conversation. But it goes further. It advances our prospect of getting out of the routine of our profession, business or art. 

The person who reads wisely and widely often finds that he has the enormous advantage of knowing more about his subject than others do. Knowledge builds self-confidence and self-reliance. 

It is true that knowledge is not necessarily a good in itself; it needs to be assimilated by the intellect and the imagination before it becomes positively valuable. We are wise to soak ourselves in as many facts and ideas as we can, so that our minds have material with which to work. 

Books will provide us with the material information we can use to answer vital questions. When we are puzzled as to why human beings behave as they do we cannot find the answer in our surroundings but in the long perspective of history. 

A person reading well-selected books becomes a denizen of all nations, a contemporary of all ages. In books one meets all kinds of people, the wisest, the wittiest and the tenderest. 

Whether you read Jane Austen, dealing with her little community of country gentlefolk, clergymen and middle-class persons, or Somerset Maugham, ranging over the world and an infinity of characters, you are adding to your own experience that of others. You tend to became many-sided and to take large view. You expand your range of pleasures; your taste grows supple and flexible. 

Selection of books to read is highly personal. Whatever the learned may say in praise of a book, it is not for you unless you can get interested in it. And literature suited to desolate islands my not be the thing at all for reading on a bus or train or airplane, or at a lunch counter. 

One guide can be stated without equivocation: if you want to be vitalized into the power of thinking real thoughts; if you wish to be qualified to debate the issues of the day; then resolutely leave out whatever is not of the best. 

Some of the books we choose will not be crammed full of information, but are valuable because they contain exquisite nosegays of wisdom. Some will not deal with details but with principles, and principles are the most hardy, convertible, operable and usable species of literary property. 

The ‘great’ books are not made great because someone names them so, but because they contain lessons for all times. In them we find the accumulated thought of mankind, a rich inheritance, a transcription of a distinguished conversation across the ages. A great book does not speak to a lonely and sympathetic figure here and there, but to a whole world. 

Some of the great books are classics, a word that stands for the books that have worn best. They appeal to the minds of people of all sorts, and they remain significant, or acquire a new significance, in new ages. 

Every department of literature has its own contribution to make to our welfare and happiness. Poetry sets down in winged words the things we think and feel but cannot say. When you read poetry you are broadening your facility in the use of language and increasing your ability to say things in different and more attractive ways. 

Prose fills more books, and it is the common way of communicating ideas. We lose something if we do not go back to some of its earlier forms, like letters and essays, for both interest and entertainment. Essays are important sources of idea-starters, whether they are gentle, witty and seductive, or rude and quarrelsome. 

“In spite of our protestations that we are ‘too busy’ to do any serious reading, we might as well honestly admit that it is .. either because we do not organize our time to fit in reading, or that we do not utilize our odd hours.” - Robert Updegraff. 

There may be people who honestly believe that they are too important, and too occupied with affairs, to spend time with books. But reading may be the most important thing they could do in life; upon their reading may depend the continued success of their undertakings; upon it certainly rests their mental well-being. 

We do not need to sit down with a book for two or three hours in order to read effectively. If we spend just fifteen minutes a day, you can read twenty average length books between January 1st and December 31st. 

There is no other occupation which you can more easily take up at any moment, for any period, and more easily put aside when other duties press upon you. 

All wise thoughts have been written already thousands of times, but to make them truly ours we must think about them as we read. How does the opinion or belief expressed by the author square with ours? Even a statement that seems to offend our common sense may be worth thinking about. Indeed, it may be worth more than the sum of many notions with which we agree. 

As we read, we should ask questions. It is questions, not answers that keep the mind alive. Our questions will start trains of thought, awaken our reasoning, bring our judgment into play, and make our experience of life fuller and more interesting. 

One is never at the end of reading. What we know is still infinitely less than all that still remains unknown. We continue to welcome information and ideas, always wondering as we climb successive hills “What lies beyond?” 

Reading is not an exercise or an act of penance, but something that holds for us the assurance of a better way of life. There are no formal educational requirements for admission to the reading elite. You just start reading; reserve the time necessary, and go on from book to book. 

- Extracted from the Royal Bank of Canada Monthly Letter.