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Years later I would come to discover, as Robinson Crusoe did when he found Man Friday, that I was not alone in that world or on that island. I would discover (through reading, naturally) that while I was sprawled, legs akimbo, in that chair with a book, Jamaica Kincaid was sitting in the glare of the Caribbean sun in Antigua reading in that same way that I did, as though she was starving and the book was bread.
多年以后我才发现自己在这个世界或小岛上并不孤单，就像鲁宾逊·克鲁索发现星期五时那样。我发现（当然，是通过读书），当我叉开两腿躺在椅子上看书的时候，牙买加·金凯德就坐在安提瓜岛上刺眼的加勒比海阳光下，和我一样读着书，仿佛饥不可耐，而书就是面包。
Reading has always been my home, my sustenance, my great invincible companion. "Book love," Trollope called it. "It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live." Yet of all the many things in which we recognize some universal comfort—God, sex, food, family, friends—reading seems to be the one in which the comfort is most undersung, at least publicly, although it was really all I thought of, or felt, when I was eating up book after book, running away from home while sitting in that chair, traveling around the world and yet never leaving the room. I did not read from a sense of superiority, or advancement, or even learning. I read because I loved it more than any other activity on earth.
阅读一直是我的家、我的食物、我那不可缺少的伴侣。特罗洛普把这称为“书恋”。他说它能使你一生中每个小时都非常愉快。”然而，在所有我们普遍认为能给人安慰的事物中——上帝、性爱、食品、家庭、朋友——读书似乎是最少被人提起的，起码在公开的场合是如此。但对我来说，读书就是我能想到、能感受到的一切：不论是在我贪婪地一本接着一本看书的时候；还是在我明明坐在椅子上，可是心却早跑出了家门的时候；或是在我满世界到处漫游，而实际上根本从来没有离开房间的时候，我这么做不是出于一种优越感，也不是为了升职，甚至和做学问都无关。我读书就是因为我喜欢，喜欢它胜过喜欢世界上任何别的活动。
By the time I became an adult, I realized that while my satisfaction in the sheer act of reading had not abated in the least, the world was often as hostile, or as blind, to that joy as had been my girlfriends banging on our screen door, begging me to put down the book—"that stupid book," they usually called it, no matter what book it happened to be.
在我成年之时，我认识到，尽管我对读书本身的兴趣丝毫未减，可是这世界却经常对这份快乐抱着一种敌对或视而不见的态度，就和当年我那些小女伴们一样——她们老是砰砰地敲我家的纱门，叫我把书放下，总说那是“无聊的书”，也不管那是什么书。
