When my family moved to a village where nobody spoke our language, I was eleven. For the first month I said almost nothing. I knew the words for water and bread, but not the words for how I felt. (11) My teacher gave me a small notebook and told me to write one new word in it every day. It did not help at once, (12) after half a year the notebook had two hundred words in it. I still could not say everything I wanted. (13), I could at last make a joke, and the class laughed at the right moment. Learning a language is not only about being understood, (14) about becoming a person other people can enjoy.
A person today reads more words in a day than a farmer a hundred years ago read in a month. Most of them are short: a message, a line on a board, a name on a door. (15) A novel asks something different. It asks you to keep your body still, to care about somebody who does not exist, and to wait. (16) that waiting is exactly what fast reading takes away. Some schools now give students twenty quiet minutes a day with any book they choose. Teachers say the weight of the book does not matter. (17), it is learning that attention can be held. The brain does not mind reading, (18) it does mind never staying anywhere.