NEWSPAPERS AND MAGAZINES

Newspapers and magazines play a very important part in our life. Practically there is no family that does not read them. We can learn many things from newspapers. Perhaps that is why many years ago an American humorous writer said: “All I know is what I see in the papers”; and another American author more than half a century ago wrote that “the careful reader of a few good newspapers can learn more in a year than most scientists do in their great libraries”.

We can agree or disagree with these statements (better to disagree, because scientific books and magazines have more information than newspapers), but we'll have to say that newspapers help us in many ways. There are a lot of different kinds of newspapers in our country. One can buy them practically everywhere. It is impossible to read all the newspapers and magazines. Everyone has favourite ones.

My favourite newspaper is “Komsomolskaya Pravda”. We can read almost about everything in this newspaper. There are articles dealing with home and abroad news, sport events, life of favourite actors and singers and even the weather. We can find many interesting things there. We can read some useful pieces of advice, some stories about our life, and so on. There are puzzles, songs and even anecdotes there. “Komsomolskaya Pravda” is one of the most interesting newspapers, to my mind.

FAVOURITE WRITER

My favourite writer is Ernest Hemingway. He will al-ways be remembered as a writer of prose in which every word had meaning and where nothing was wasted. His style had, in fact, such a widespread effect on British and American literature that dozens of imitators appeared and today many novels are accused of being “pseudo-Hemingway”.

The son of a small-town doctor, Hemingway was born in Illinois in 1898. He gained from his father an early love of fishing and shooting, interests which were to colour his life and work. Hemingway was educated at schools in America and France. His father wanted him to be a doctor, but he became a newspaper reporter, and then served with the Italian Red Cross as an ambulance driver in World War 1.

Severely wounded in the fighting, Hemingway used this, as well as his boyhood experiences, as the material for his first books. In “A Farewell to Arms”, “For Whome the Bell Tolls” and “The Old Man and the Sea” he wrote three classics of 20th century literature.

“A Farewell to Arms” is a powerful anti-war story, but it remains a love-story, telling of the ill-fated romance between Frederic Henry, a young American serving as a volunteer in the Italian army, and Catherine Barkley, a British nurse. Frederic gradually decides to get out of the war and make a separate peace. He and his wife manage to get to neutral Switzerland where they are happy for a time. But the ending is tragic, for Catherine dies. This novel shows Hemingway's hatred of the world that “kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially”. It is very sad, but very interesting and very important. It is my favourite book.