我想找金融和投资方面的职位，因为你知道这样我就可以用上我的专业知识。可是那时候已经没有这样的工作了，我又不愿意做乏味的办公室工作，复印文件、端茶倒水什么的。
无论你走到伦敦的什么地方，你都能找到一个好酒吧。有一天，我意识到这个城里没有人会雇我，我走进位于特荷街的索尔兹伯里酒吧去喝一杯，顺便吃点东西。店主麦克正在店里，他一只手倒酒，一只手做三明治，同时还洗酒杯。他真的好像有三只手。他好像也认识所有的客人，叫得出常客的名字。
他跟他们打招呼，帮他们调好酒后问一句：―今天还喝这个，是吧？‖我觉得他看起来蛮酷的，他在做着他最擅长做的事情：为那些口渴的顾客服务，没人能比得上他。所以我就走上前去问他要不要雇人。好吧，长话短说，某个周五的午餐时间我开始在那个酒吧打工。这份工作要求很高，但我喜欢干。
顾客好像觉得我挺逗乐的，这也让我感觉好一些。有位穿西服的中年常客总要半品脱苦啤酒，一份火腿泡菜三明治，面包皮要消掉。他叫托尼。我一看见他进来，不等他开口就开始准备他的午餐，他也是那些好心人之一。
依我看，一个人没钱的时候花钱最容易。我开始琢磨怎么花第一个月的薪水了。我住的公寓房租很贵，我挣的钱刚够支付第一个月的大笔账单，但是我估计还能剩点钱好好犒劳一下自己。我想，何不买张CD 或买盆花草装点一下房间？
发工资的那天正好是我的生日，除了麦克和托尼，我在伦敦就没有别的朋友了。如果你知道我那时还没有男朋友，你就会理解我为什么觉得对不起自己了。我给自己定了些鲜花，让卖花的人附上一张卡片，上面写道：―给你我所有的爱。无名氏‖。我生日那天最精彩的瞬间就是送花人到达公寓时大惑不解的眼神。
那周晚些时候，托尼像往常一样来了，在酒吧里坐下。―你怎么了？今天怎么不见你笑啦？‖我跟他聊了…… 嗯，差不多什么都跟他说了：钱、硕士学位、生日等等。他很同情我。
托尼离开搁脚凳和旁边几个人说话。记住：索尔兹伯里酒吧是在市中心，这里所有的顾客都在银行、保险或证券市场工作。第二天，他拿着几张价值共2 万英镑的支票来到酒吧，他对我说：―这是给你的创业贷款，你唯一的贷款担保是我对你的信任，相信有一天你赚了钱会把钱还给我们。如果你还不了钱，那就太糟了，金融生意就是这样。但是，我相信你还得了。‖
我没说话，我怕我自己要哭了。世上这么好的人能有几个？
那些花怎么处理？我叫花店改送到妈妈那里去了，我生日那天鲜花正好送到她家。她最该得到这些鲜花，不是吗？
依我看，回顾这些年的经历，我发现人一辈子只需要一两次的转折就能成功。就算吃苦受累也不要紧，那还是值得的。
在索尔兹伯里酒吧干了一年之后，我去了伦敦经济学院深造。拿到硕士学位之后，我在一家投资银行找到了一份工作。我把那两万英镑投进了证券市场，在2008 年金融崩盘之前卖掉了所有的股票。
我把托尼和其他投资者的钱还了，付给他们10% 的年息，并成立了自己的公司。公司的生意好得超乎意料，至今还红红火火。托尼给我写了一封感谢信。他出了车祸，现在不能走路了。我还给他的钱正好可以用来改造房子，房子改造后他就可以坐着轮椅在家里自由活动了。下面是他信里写的话：―我从事银行业35 年来最好的投资就是给你的这笔贷款，你连本带利地偿还了贷款，我对你的信任和你的诚实都获得了百倍的回报。依我看，在人身上投资能带来你最希望看到的回报。‖
依我看，他说得对。你说呢？
Unit 2
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Active reading (1)
Danger! Books may change your life Culture points
Lewis Carroll (1832–1898) is the pen-name of Charles Dodgson. He was a priest, a mathematician whotaught at Oxford University, a photographer, humorist and writer of children‘s literature. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) was immediately successful, a masterpiece which revolutionized children‘s literature, giving coherence and logic through wit and humour to unlikely or impossible episodes in which imaginary creatures embody recognizable human characteristics. He is also known for Through the Looking Glass and
what Alice found there (1871) and nonsense poems, such as The Hunting of the Snark (1876).
William Cowper (1731–1800): a notable English poet, writer of hymns and letter-writer. He wrote gentle, pious, direct poems about everyday rural life and scenes of the countryside which have been seen as forerunners of the Romantic movement: Coleridge called Cowper ―the best modern poet‖. He translated Homer‘s Greek epics. The Odyssey and The Iliad into English. Another example of his verses which have become common sayings is ―God moves in mysterious ways, His wonders to perform…‖
John Steinbeck (1902–1968): American novelist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. The Grapes of Wrath (1939) is a well-known, long tragic novel about an American family of farmers who are driven off their land in Oklahoma by soil erosion in the famous ―dust bowl‖ era. They flee to California to
what they hope will be a better life. The book won the Pulitzer Prize and was made into a film in 1940. Other well-known novels include Of Mice and Men (1937), Cannery Row (1945), The Pearl (1947), East of Eden (1952) and an account of a personal rediscovery of America, Travels with Charlie (1962).
John Irving (1942– ): American novelist and screenwriter who taught English at college and was a wrestling coach. The Fourth Hand (2001) is a comic-satirical novel about a TV journalist, Wallington, whose hand is seen by millions of viewers to be bitten off by a circus lion. A surgeon gives him a hand transplant (a third hand) but the wife of the dead donor wants to visit her husband‘s hand and have a child by Wallington, who feels where his original hand used to be (the fourth hand).
Audrey Niffenegger (1963– ): American college professor who teaches writing to visual artists and shows students how to make books by hand. Her first novel, The Time Traveller’s Wife (2003) –
filmed in 2009 – is a science fiction and romance bestseller about a man who travels uncontrollably in time to his own history and visits his wife in her childhood, youth and old age. His wife needs to cope with his absences and dangerous life while he travels. The story is a metaphor for distance and miscommunication in failed relationships.
Paul Torday (1946– ): a British businessman who worked for a company that repaired ship‘s engines for many years. Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (2007) was his first novel. It is a political satire and comedy about a dull civil servant who becomes involved in a plan to populate the desert with Scottish salmon. Politicians manage the media to ―spin‖ this as a plan they support in order to divert attention from problems in the Middle East. There are themes of cynicism and belief, and East-West culture clashes.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008): a Russian writer who was imprisoned in Soviet labour camps in 1945; after eight years, he was exiled to Kazakhstan and not freed until 1956, when he became a teacher. In 1970 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature but not receive it until 1974. He went
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to Germany, Switzerland and the USA, returning to Russia in 1994. His best known novels were based on his experiences as a prisoner and include: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), Cancer Ward (1968), The Gulag Archipelago (1974–1978). His later works were about Russian history and identity.
Graham Greene (1904–1991): a British novelist, short-story writer, playwright, travel writer and essayist. He wrote a number of thrillers (he called them ?entertainments‘) which dramatize an
ambiguous moral dilemma, often revealing guilt, treachery, failure and a theme of pursuit. Greene was also a film critic and all of these novels have been made into films: Brighton Rock (1938), The Power and the Glory (1940), The Heart of the Matter (1948), The Third Man (1950), The Quiet American (1955), and Our Man in Havana (1958).
E. M. Forster (1879–1970): a British novelist and writer of short stories and essays. He lived at
different periods in Italy, Egypt and India and taught at Cambridge University. His best known novels include A Room with a View (1908), Howard’s End (1910), A Passage to India (1924) which have all been made into films. His writing about reading and writing includes a book of lectures, Aspects of the Novel (1927).
Thomas Merton (1915–1968): an American Catholic writer, who was a Trappist monk in Kentucky. He wrote over 70 books, including many essays about Buddhism and a translation into English of the Chinese classic, Chuang Tse. He had a great deal to say about the meeting of Eastern and Western cultures and wrote many letters to writers, poets, scholars and thinkers. He read a lot in English, Latin, French and Spanish and said he always had at least three books which he was reading at any one time. William Blake (1757–1827): a British poet, artist and mystic, who read widely in English, French, Italian, Latin, Greek and Hebrew. He made many engravings to illustrate the work of such writers as Virgil, Dante and Chaucer, as well as his own poems. He stressed that imagination was more
important than rationalism and the materialism of the 18th century and criticized the effects of the industrial revolution in England, but his work was largely disregarded by his peers. He is best known for his poetry in Songs of Innocence (1787) and Songs of Experience (1794). His belief in the oneness of all created things is shown in his much-quoted verse, ―To see the world in a grain of sand / And a heaven in a flower, / Hold infinity in the palm of your hand / And eternity in an hour.‖
Clifton Fadiman (1904–1999): an American writer, radio and TV broadcaster and editor of
anthologies. For over 50 years he was an editor and judge for the Book-of-the-Month Club. In 1960 he wrote a popular guide to great books for American readers, The Lifetime Reading Plan, which discusses 133 authors and their major work: the 1997 edition includes 9 authors from China.
J. K. Rowling (1965–): British writer of the seven Harry Potter fantasy books. She studied French and Classics at Exeter University, before teaching English in Portugal and training to teach French in Scotland. The main idea about a school for wizards and the orphan Harry Potter came on a delayed train journey from Manchester to London in 1990. She began to write as soon as she reached London. Twelve publishersrejected the first book before Bloomsbury, a small London publisher, agreed to publish it. Later books have repeatedly broken all the sales records (as have some of the films). She is one of the richest women in the UK and a notable supporter of many charities.
Language points
1 Variety’s the very spice of life, / That gives it all its flavour … (Para 2)
Spices are made from plants and added to food to give it its particular flavour or taste. The English proverb
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―Variety is the spice of life‖ (the proverb comes from Cowper‘s poem) therefore means that variety gives
life extra value and allows you to appreciate life in particular ways.
2 We learn to look beyond our immediate surroundings to the horizon and a landscape far away from
home. (Para 3)
This means that through reading we learn to look beyond our immediate experience or familiar
environment to things beyond our immediate experience, ie to completely different things that we can imagine and experience through books.
3 When a baseball player hits a home run he hits the ball so hard and so far he’s able to run round the
four bases of the diamond, and score points not only for himself but for the other runners already
on a base. (Para 9)
In the American game of baseball, the field of grass is diamond-shaped and has four bases (specific points
marked around the diamond), round which players must run to score points. One team bats (ie team members take turns to hit the ball and run round the bases) and the members of the other team throw (pitch)
the ball and, when it is has been hit, try to catch it or get it quickly to one of the four bases. If a batting player can hit the ball hard enough, he can run round all four bases before the other team can get the ball
and thus score maximum points – with a home run. In the passage, a really good book is a home run.
3 Choose the best answer to the questions. 1 Why are we like Alice in wonderland when we read a book? (a) Because, like Alice, we often have accidents. (b) Because reading makes us feel young again.
(c) Because reading opens the door to new experiences. (d) Because books lead us into a dream world.
2 According to the writer, what is the advantage of reading over real life? (a) There is more variety in books than in real life.
(b) We can experience variety and difference without going out of the house. (c) The people we meet in a book are more interesting than real people. (d) It‘s harder to make sense of real life than a book.
3 What do the seven novels listed in Paragraph 4 have in common? (a) Their titles stimulate imagination.
(b) They represent the best writing by British and American novelists. (c) They have become classics.
(d) You can find all of them in any local library.
4 At what moment in our lives do books become important? (a) As soon as we start reading.
(b) When we start buying books to fill our shelves at home. (c) When we start listening to bedtime stories.
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