Reading books

I think reading books is very interesting –that is for me, but it is also too important for those who want to improve their grammar in that language in which they want to improve. I like reading books, but I do not have a lot of time to read what I really want. I like romantic, adventure or thriller books. The book must interest me immediately from the beginning. But reading would not exist without literature. I like more English literature than American, but also some American` s writings are quite good.

I think the greatest personality of English literature is William Shakespeare and it is not only my idea. He was born in 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of eighteen he mar-ried Anne Hathaway, who was eight years older than himself. A few years later he moved to London, where he worked as an actor and a playwright. He wrote 37 plays and 154 sonnets. His most famous plays are four great tragedies- Othello, Macbeth, Hamlet and King Lear. He also wrote several historical plays. Eight of these were about English kings, including Richard II., Henry V. and Richard III. Others dealt with Roman history and included Julius Caesar and Anthony and Cleopatra. He wrote also comedies, such as A Midsummer Night` s Dream, Twelfth Night, The Merchant of Venice and As You Like It. Shakespeare died in Stratford on 23 April 1616, but his plays are very popular today. They have been translated into several differ-ent languages, and many of them have been made into films. Shakespeare` s plays are about the great issues of life- love, hatred, jealousy, power, ambition, death and so son. His early come-dies include- The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of The Shrew, The Two Gentlemen of Ve-rona…

The most representative figure of American literature of the first half of 20th century is Ernest Hemingway. He was born on July 21st 1899 in Illinois, USA in a doctor` s family. He left college to begin a career of a journalist. During the First World War he was sent to Europe with an Ambulance unit. He was seriously injured so he had to return to the USA to recover. He took different jobs and married for the first time. Later he went to France as a foreign corre-spondent for Toronto Star. He met there other American writers. Soon he published his first collection of stories and the first novel The Sun Also Rises which made him famous. Novel A Farewell to Arms contains the beautiful and poignant love story of an American ambulance driver and an English nurse. His subjects were often war and its effects on people. His style of writing is striking. He uses short sentences, his words are simple, yet they are often filled with emotion. He is a master of pause. Hemingway turned to other subjects in Men without Women, Green Hills of Africa, The Fifth Column, Fiesta, Death in the Afternoon and many others which were published in his lifetime. A Movable Feast and Islands in the Stream are his posthumous works. There are also others well-known novels for example For Whom the Bell Tolls is a powerful account of the Spanish Civil War and also The Old Man and the Sea published in 1952, brought him the Nobel Prize in 1954. Hemingway died in a gun accident, at hi home in Sun Valley, Idaho, on July 3rd 1961.