Introduction - Why study Literature

Try to write a description of all these things. Don't forget that people talk to each other. Give them things to say.
B. Take an incident from a book you have read. Rewrite it by changing the names of the people and the place where the story takes place. If you try this exercise several times you will find that you can make more and more changes until you have a story which is more and more your own.
Practice writing stories as often as you can. There is not much point criticising other people's writing if you haven't tried yourself.
Easy to Read and Difficult to Read
I hope you understand now that when a book is easy to read or difficult to read it is partly the reader and partly the book which causes the difficulty. There is no such thing as a book for everyone. When Albert Einstein published his Theory of Relativity there may have been no more than a dozen people in the whole world who could understand it; perhaps not even that many. Even now most people cannot understand it. But for those who could understand it, it was the most interesting book they had ever read. They had had the right kind of experiences to enable them to understand what Einstein had seen. Nowadays the right kind of experience is an intensive study of theoretical physics for many years.
The simplest book is difficult for those who can't read.
Unfortunately books do not usually have a label on them telling you what you need to know before you read them. (Some books intended for beginners studying English as a second language are labelled with the vocabulary used - these are the specially written Simplified Books). The only thing you can do is to read those books which you find interesting, leave those books which you find impossible, and try hard with those books you find difficult but want or need to read.
If you find all or most of the set books impossible you probably should not be trying to study literature. If you only find them difficult, keep trying.

Something to do
Look at your list of books read. Can you say which of them you might want to read again, and those you don't expect to read again?
Perhaps you have already read a book for the second time. Write a review and compare it with what you wrote before (if you wrote one the first time). Did you see more in the book more the second time? Or less?
In the study of literature we looking for the kind in which we see more the second time (and later times).

Scrap Book
Sometimes you may find in a book a paragraph or sentence which uses language so well that you want to remember it. Why not keep an exercise book for passages you particularly like. You can call it a Scrap Book. Most writers keep notebooks for such things. But be careful if you use quotations in your own work. Never pretend someone else's work is your own. That is Plagiarism and you can find yourself in a court case over it. The way to avoid being accused of plagiarism is to put the author's name after the quotation.

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