A word about books. Man invented a number of means to cover distance - cars, planes, radio, TV, computers, spaceships, etc. But  up till now there has been only one way to covor time- books. Reading is real fun, isn't it? It may be a fantastic journey into the past or the future, a true love story or a serious novel to challenge your thoughts, a detective or something funny if you like humour.
Until recently you could see a lot of people, old and young, reading in many different places, in a park or on a bus, in a plane or on a beach. It might be a magazine or a newspaper, a volume of poems or a lengthy novel. All kinds of reading stuff. But now it's a rare event. Altenrative sources of information like TV or computers seen more attractive to most people. But books give us something different from them. It's a dialogue with somebody who can tell you a lot about life, people, their relations, and about this fast changing world. Books help you understand yourself better. They develop imagination, love for word and expression and awaken a wish in you to create  something. It is next to impossible to imagine life without  books.

The  way we read. We read in meany different ways, and at different speeds depending on the aim of reading. We sometimes look through the book to see what it is about. We may just want to get the general idea from a newspaper article, a report , or a book in a bookshop. This type of reading is callled skimming reading.
Quick reading is also practised when we want to get a  particular piece of information, such as a date or a telephone directories, dictionaries and web pages. 
But if we want to get  the detailed information we read slowly and carefully. This is called intensive  reading, it needs training and special skills to understand the entire content, the beauty of the expression. You get involved in the story. It makes you laugh your head off or cry your heart out. It develops your personality.