KNIHA – PRIATEĽ ČLOVEKA

In comparison with the passive consumption of TV culture, reading is a highly active hobby. During our life we meet both fiction and nonfiction. When we read for pleasure, we usually pick up a book of fiction, such as novels ( science fiction , westerns, travel books, thrillers, crime fiction, wwwantiskolask psychological and historical novels, adventure tales, love stories ), short stories and tales and poetry. There are various ways to choose a book for reading. Some of us read a book for its subject and setting, others for the author or on personal recommendation. Also reasons why we read may be different – we read for relaxation and pleasure, or we look for information and advice. We can buy books, or we can borrow them from friends and from a library. If we need information, it is good to have various dictionaries, outlines, encyclopedias, technical and scientific literature, atlases, textbooks, biographies and history and art books at hand.

All towns and a lot of villages have a public library, in Britain, where you can borrow books. At a lot of libraries you can also borrow videos, CDs and CD-ROMs. The books are free but you usually have to pay for the other things.
Almost all towns and a lot of villages have libraries in Slovakia too, but we must pay for them.

There are a lot of outstanding novelist in English literature but one of the greatest is Charles Dickens. He wrote about the real world of Victorian England and many of his characters were not rich, middle-class ladies and gentlemen, but poor and hungry people.
The Charles Dickens´ family lived in London. His father was a clerk in an office. It was a good job, but he always spent more money then he earned and he was often in debt. There were eight children in the family, so life was hard.
Charles went to school and his teachers thought he was very clever. But suddenly, when he was only eleven, his father went to prison for his debts and the family went, too. Only Charles didn´t go to prison. He went to work in a factory, where he washed bottles. He worked ten hours a day and earned six shillings ( 30p ) a week. Every night, after work, he walked four miles back to his room. Charles hated it and never forgot the experience. He used it in many novels, especially DAVID COPPERFIELD and OLIVER TWIST.
When he was sixteen, he started work for a newspaper. He visited law courts and the Houses oh Parliament. Soon he was one of the MORNING CHRONICLE´S best journalists. He also wrote short stories for magazines. These were funny descriptions of people that he met. Dickens´ characters were full of colour and life – good people were very, very good and bad people were horrible. His books became popular in many countries and he spent a lot of time abroad, in America, Italy, and Switzerland.
Dickens had ten children, but he didn´t have a happy family life. He was successful in his work but not at home, and his wife left him. He never stopped writing and travelling, and he died very suddenly in 1870.
But at present, in the 21st century Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Hawking are commonly read. What do they have in common? The answer is that they are all best-selling writers and men of vision. ASIMOV was born in Russia in 1920. His family emigrated to the United States when he was three, and Asimov soon became a citizen of the USA. Asimov was a chemist and a scientist, and he published over 500 books. Many of these were about science, with titles like UNDERSTANDING PHYSICS and INSIDE THE ATOM. Asimov´s aim was to explain ideas in a way ordinary readers could understand. Although Asimov died 1992, many of his books on science are still published today. He also wrote science fiction stories and is best – known for his robot stories and the FOUNDATION series. The robot stories dealt with the ways in which robots would work for human beings, and his ideas about robotics and artificial intelligence will survive into the future.
For many people, Arthur C. CLARKE is the best science fiction writer of our time. Clarke was born in England, but he lived in Sri Lanka since 1956. He´s the author of more than sixty books with over 50 million copies in print. Clarke started life as a scientist. By 1945, he invented satellite communication and, in 1947, he predicted the Moon landing. In more recent years, Clarke has become interested in exploring the ocean. Clarke has worked on films and television. Clarke shared on Oscar nomination for the film of his book, 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. The best character in the film is the computer – HAL. HAL plays chess, speaks, reads lips and plans to kill the crew of the spaceship. Some of today´s computers are becoming more like HAL as they learn to do more and more. Clarke once said that he starts with what we know and predicts what might happen from there. Surprisingly, Clarke, who sometimes needs a wheelchair because of his age and a previous illness, has little interest in the Internet and only uses the technology to keep in touch with the world.
STEPHEN HAWKING was born in 1942. Hawking is a best-selling author, but he’s also a renowned scientist, and since 1979 he has been Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge. Hawking has explored the basic laws that govern the Universe. In his best-selling book, A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME, he tries to explain complex ideas about black holes and other concepts in Theoretical Physics. Although the title was an enormous best-seller, it is difficult to read Hawking is an easily recognizable figure. He suffers from a serious nerve disease and moves about Cambridge in an electric wheelchair. He lost the ability to speak in 1985 and cannot get in and out of bed without help. He is able to continue to work, write and give lectures with the help of technology. He has a computer on his wheelchair and uses all the latest technology to produce speech and connect to the Internet from his wheelchair.

Asimov, Clarke and Hawking are original scientific thinkers whose ideas have reached a wide audience. Who will we remember most in a hundred years time?