After passing the exam, I abandoned my habit of studying stoically and devoted myself to reading complete works of world literature. When I imagine my life after retirement, the first thing that comes to mind is reading. The reason why ``reading'' came into being is because people feel that they can't read books to their heart's content until they reach retirement age.
I felt that I had to leave work to be allowed to indulge in so-called reading. On the other hand, I could say that I've been looking forward to retirement because I want to enjoy the environment of reading books and the sense of mental freedom that comes with it.
There was a time in my life where I enjoyed this ``abundance of reading'' and ``a sense of mental freedom.'' It was my high school days. I hated studying for entrance exams and just read books. For me, that was the period when I began to read extensively, and writers often talk about their experiences of reading extensively when they were young, but I did not read as much as the writer, and my chosen profession had nothing to do with writing.
As you can guess, it's a pretty standard random reading course. In other words, I read the complete collection of world literature from beginning to end. Many of these complete works are relatively long novels, and my preference for long novels depends on my reading experience at the time.
Starting with Goethe's ``The Sorrows of Young Werther'' and ``Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship'', Hermann Hesse's ``Under the Wheel'', ``Narcis and Goldmund'', Stendhal's ``Red and Black'', Tolstoy's ``Resurrection'', and Dostoyevsky. ``Crime and Punishment'', ``The Minor'', ``The Idiot'', ``The Evil Spirit'', Romain Rolland's ``Jean-Christophe'' and ``The Enchanted Soul'', Jean-Jacques Rousseau's ``Reverie of the Lonely Walker'', Camille's ``The Stranger'' I'm not sure if the order is as follows: "The Plague" and Somerset Maugham's "The Moon and Sixpence," but for about a year and a half, my high school life revolved around this wildly read novel.
