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Why I chose a life with books.
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That's the name of this video today.
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I think it's going to be something fairly interesting to talk about.
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You know, not everybody chooses a life with books or falls into a life with books, but I did, and I'm glad that I did.
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It has had its costs, but it's got, you know, it's like anything else.
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It's got its pros and cons, and I want to talk about both of those in this video.
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My name is Randy Wright.
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This channel is called The Literate Texan.
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I'm the host here.
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We talk about books and literature, highbrow, lowbrow, and everything in between.
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We definitely avoid being snobbish about what we're reading and literature here and stuff,
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and we certainly don't have any prejudices against specific genres
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but uh what inspired this video i was reminiscing i was thinking about this i most people know
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that i have a college degree in english literature
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and to get a college degree in english literature one of
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the things you do is take a course on shakespeare you take a whole course on shakespeare and my professor,
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I took Shakespeare probably in 1990, 1991, something like that.
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My professor and I ran into each other on Facebook probably 15 years ago, maybe 20 years ago.
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We hadn't spoken since I had him as a teacher, but we were catching up.
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This is what I've been doing.
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This is what he's doing.
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He retired from teaching and started writing and self-publishing mystery novels, which I thought was pretty cool.
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Anyway, he was a good professor, and I enjoyed his Shakespeare class, and I told him as much, and told him about the bookstore.
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At the time, I owned and operated a small bookstore, and he told me, I think it's wonderful that you found a way to live a life filled with books,
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and I've been thinking about that, and there's a word there that I want to take a little bit of issue with
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and we were just having a conversation
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so you know I don't like to nitpick words
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when you're just having a conversation
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but in this particular instance I didn't find a life with
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books I chose a life with books I chose to be surrounded by books all my life
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and I have my reasons for
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that I'm gonna talk about them in this video um but yeah this wasn't just something I
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lucked into this whole being a reader thing, okay?
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This was the culmination of a lot of decisions.
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One reason that I've had a life surrounded by books, or that I've chosen a life surrounded by books, is my attitude about books has been changing.
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As you've watched this channel, you'll notice that my attitude about books has been changing too.
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There was a time when I saw the number of books I'd read as a trophy or some kind of scorecard.
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There was an annual goal to hit, and it was a big deal whether or not I actually reached that goal.
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Now I think of books less as trophies or achievements when there's nothing wrong with thinking about them that way.
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But now I think of books as my companions.
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They're my friends.
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There's an Arthur Conan Doyle book where he talks about his library, and he explains, or he's making the point that,
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you know, we've got access to the greatest thoughts, the greatest minds of history.
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And if we had the opportunity to have dinner with these people, if we had the opportunity to have dinner with Shakespeare and Montaigne and Henry David Thoreau,
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among others, you know, we wouldn't hesitate.
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We'd be thrilled to have an opportunity to sit down and talk with Charles Dickens, for example.
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But guess what?
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The best things that Charles Dickens ever thought or said, he wrote down.
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We can talk to them or at least listen to them across the space of years.
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That's an incredibly attractive idea to me that I can engage in conversations with people who have been dead for sometimes centuries,
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but at least dozens of years in a lot of cases.
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And it's really wonderful to have that kind of, well, I'll put it this way, okay?
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So I have a sister who doesn't read, okay?
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I love her to death.
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And she's a smart lady, but she just doesn't read.
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She's not a reader and never has been.
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And I feel like her life is very narrow compared to mine
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because I've done a lot of reading on a lot of different subjects
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and I feel like I've lived a thousand different lives, okay?
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Now, have I really lived a thousand different lives?
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No, but it kind of feels that way because I've experienced things through reading these books,
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telepathically reading as a form of telepathy.
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And so, you know, I have experiences as a police detective
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and as a firefighter and as a werewolf hunter and as a knight of the round table.
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I have these experiences that I wouldn't have ever had if I hadn't been a reader.
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I also want to make it clear, though, that this life of books, this life surrounded with books, was not part of some kind of master plan that I had.
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Yes, I did start reading at a very young age, but I didn't sit down and say, okay, I'm going to go become the best, the most well-read man in America.
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And thank goodness, because if that were my goal, I'd fail miserably, because I'm not nearly as well-read as I would like to be.
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I have ideas about what being well-read means, but that's the subject of another video that I'll come out with someday.
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But, yeah, so...
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So, I've just gradually over time accumulated books and read more books.
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Lots of little decisions.
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You know, am I going to watch a movie tonight or am I going to read a book?
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You know, I've chosen movies a lot of times, but I've chosen books often enough that I've become,
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if not well-read, at least I'm a reader.
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I've, yeah, video games don't appeal to me.
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I don't spend a lot of time scrolling up and down social media because while I'm doing that, I could be reading Great Expectations or Hamlet again.
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To me, there's no contest.
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Books have also changed my way of thinking.
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They've changed how my mind works.
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And I think books have changed the way my mind works in ways that I'm really happy about, okay?
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For example, I have a longer attention span than most people.
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Most people's attention spans, I remember in college, you know, one of my professors was complaining
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that it used to be they would have to change subjects
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or switch gears every eight minutes or so while they were teaching class.
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Because eight minutes was the amount of time that passed on television before another commercial showed up.
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But that in recent years it had changed and now there were only seven minutes between commercials.
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And I don't know what the time is now, but yeah, that certainly had the effect of lowering the attention span of the viewers of these TV shows, but it's gotten even worse.
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You know, now, you know, you've got videos that are, you know, less than a minute long or two minutes long
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or three minutes long on some social media app called TalkTick or something like that.
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And I don't, I don't know.
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I want to have a long attention span.
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I want to think about things over the long term.
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I don't want little instant shots of dopamine repeatedly throughout the day.
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You know, that's just, it's not my cup of tea.
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So luckily my brain doesn't work that way anymore.
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And that's because I've trained it by reading books for a long time.
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You know, I've got a kind of patience for things to develop in real life
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that I wouldn't have if I weren't a reader.
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I'm absolutely convinced of it.
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So that's another reason that I chose a life full of books.
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i did promise at the beginning of this video
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that i was going to be honest with you about a
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life filled with books there are costs involved um it's not
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free for one thing um books cost money most most people i know
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that are readers buy books now you can be a serious reader
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and never pay for a book in your entire life we have a wonderful public library system in this country
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but but most people i know that are readers they they do even
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if they read from the library some of the times they also buy books too.
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They have their own book collection.
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So yeah, I've spent money on that, money that's not going to come back.
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In fact, I've spent more money on books than most people because, you know, I bought the stock of a bookstore and yeah,
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so I bought a lot of books all at one time
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and I bought a lot of books over the time period that I ran the bookstore and was unable to sell them.
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So eventually I sold them, but I sold them for less than I paid for them.
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Would I take that experience back?
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It's really hard for me to say.
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On one hand, it adds to the overall bookish arc of my life, which I don't really want to change.
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You know, I think when I die and people remember me, they're going to remember, hey, Randy was a cool guy.
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He sure did read a lot.
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You know, I like that people are going to remember me that way because that's how I like to think about myself.
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I like to think of myself as someone who, man, I sure do read a lot.
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But yeah, So there was that cost, but also, you know, reading a book means spending time alone.
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You know, I've spent more time alone than some people my age have because I was reading a book instead of socializing.
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But I did for a while, Lead Only Lifestyle, where I went to the bar every night.
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And that was my lifestyle.
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And I did not read as much in those days.
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I still got some reading in, but not like I do now.
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For one thing, if you go to the bar every night you're you're probably going to be buzzed every night
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when you get home and
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and reading when you're under the influence is not the same experience as reading
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when you're stone cold sober i can promise you
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that also you know being a reader i'm in touch with other decades
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and centuries in a way that other people are not people
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that aren't readers aren't as in touch with them
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but the drawback to that is sometimes i'm a little out of step with current trends and fads.
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You know, a friend of mine told me one time, he said, man, you were just, you're just born in the wrong decade, man.
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He said, I've never met anybody who preferred so much old stuff to so much new stuff.
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You'd rather, you'd literally rather watch a movie from the 1940s than a movie from the 1990s or from the 2020s.
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So, you know, but so yeah, so that's a cost.
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The fact that I'm a little bit out of step.
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Would I gladly pay all those costs again if I had it to do over again.
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Absolutely.
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I love my little bookish life and I've really enjoyed it.
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Yeah, books broaden my thinking.
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I had a boss one time at, I worked at Hotels.com for years, 10 years.
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I worked there from 1996 to the year 2005
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and one of the owners of the company was a man named David Litman.
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Brilliant man, wonderful, wonderful boss.
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Would do almost anything for him to this day.
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He was really terrific and really loyal.
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But David was a reader too, and he loved it that I was a reader.
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And we talked about books on a fairly regular basis.
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And he told me one time, he said, every time you read a book, it's like you've built an addition onto your home, your mind being the home.
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And every book is like an extra room that you're building in your home of your mind.
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And I always thought that was just such a lovely way to look at
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And it's almost the opposite of what Sherlock Holmes is trying
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to tell Dr. Watson at the beginning of a study in Scarlet about how, you know, my mind's like an attic and I don't want to put too much furniture in there.
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I won't be able to find the furniture that I need when I need it.
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and yeah, that's not the kind of mind that I want to have.
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That almost seems stoic in principle and we all know already, if you watch the channel very much,
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you know how I feel about stoicism compared with Epicureanism or maybe you don't.
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If that's the case, you know, stick around for a while.
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You'll see me talk about it at some point but at this point, I want to thank you for watching.
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I've really enjoyed my life with books.
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do you consider yourself to have a life full of books
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and if not are you planning to change that is
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that why you watch this video or or if
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so you know do you have any regrets related to living a life surrounded by books
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or with books let me know in the comments down below
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and uh thanks for watching stay sexy folks and stay hydrated
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Per chi è questo video?
Questo video è perfetto per gli appassionati di inglese che vogliono migliorare la comprensione orale e la pronuncia, soprattutto se amano i libri e le storie personali. Ideale per livelli intermedi che cercano pratica di conversazione in inglese in contesti reali, ma anche per principianti che vogliono approfondire l'uso di espressioni colloquiali. È un'ottima occasione per esercitare il shadowing in inglese, poiché il discorso è fluido ma non troppo veloce, con pause naturali che facilitano la ripetizione.
Parole e modi di dire da rubare
- Fall into a life with books: "Incadere in una vita con i libri" – Esprime l'idea di entrare in una situazione senza planificarla. Esempio: "Non ho scelto di lavorare in libreria, sono caduto in questa vita per caso".
- Nitpick words: "Criticare le parole a piccole mosse" – Riferirsi a analizzare i dettagli con troppa precisione. Esempio: "Non mi piace nitpick words, ma 'affare' non è la parola giusta qui".
- Culmination of a lot of decisions: "Culminazione di molte decisioni" – Il risultato finale di diverse scelte. Esempio: "La mia carriera come scrittore è la culmination of a lot of decisions".
Come fare a pronunciare bene come lo speaker
Il speaker ha un accento americano chiaro, con una pronuncia rilassata. Per imitarlo, focalizzatevi su due aspetti: la riduzione delle vocali (ad esempio, "gotta" invece di "got to") e l'intonazione, che sale e scende per enfatizzare le emozioni. Provatelo con frasi come: "I chose a life with books" – la parola "chose" deve essere pronunciata con una "o" lunga, mentre "books" ha una "s" sonora. Usate il shadow speech: ascoltate una frase, fermate il video e ripetetela immediatamente, cercando di copiare il tono e il ritmo. Questo esercizio, chiamato anche shadowspeak, aiuta a migliorare la fluidità e la pronuncia in modo naturale. Con questo video, potrete esercitarvi mentre imparate qualcosa di nuovo sulle storie con i libri – un doppio vantaggio!
La grammatica di questo video
Le strutture che chi parla usa di più, con le parole esatte del video:
| Struttura | Nel video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — un’azione iniziata prima e ancora in corso | I've been doing · I've been thinking · has been changing |
| Present perfect have/has + participio passato — un’azione passata che conta ancora adesso | has had · I've had · you've watched |
| Forma passiva be + participio passato — conta ciò che accade, non chi lo fa | is called · be surrounded · be thrilled |
| Frasi relative who / which + frase — un’informazione in più su una persona o una cosa | people who have · anybody who preferred |
Cos'è la tecnica dello Shadowing?
Shadowing è una tecnica di apprendimento delle lingue supportata da studi scientifici, originariamente sviluppata per la formazione dei traduttori professionisti e resa popolare dal poliglotta Dr. Alexander Arguelles. Il metodo è semplice ma potente: ascolti un audio in inglese di madrelingua e lo ripeti immediatamente ad alta voce — come un'ombra che segue il parlante con un ritardo di solo 1–2 secondi. A differenza dell'ascolto passivo o degli esercizi di grammatica, lo shadowing costringe il tuo cervello e i muscoli della bocca a elaborare e riprodurre simultaneamente i modelli di discorso reale. La ricerca dimostra che migliora significativamente la precisione della pronuncia, l'intonazione, il ritmo, il discorso connesso, la comprensione dell'ascolto e la fluidità del parlato — rendendolo uno dei metodi più efficaci per la preparazione alla prova di speaking dell'IELTS e per la comunicazione reale in inglese.