Museums are for boring people? If you thought so, think again! These buildings carry with them lessons in history and evidence of times long forgotten. More like time-machines, these places can transport you to times you would have only dreamt of.

The Louvre Museum is perhaps the best and the most revered museums of our times. The spectacularly placed glass pyramid represents Paris on the world map of the best museums. Housing a collection of art pieces that date back to Venus de Milo, this museum offers art lovers the refuge unattainable anywhere else in this world. Second up is the Hermitage Museum which is located in Russia. Housing over 3 million artifacts, this building has taken up six more to accommodate its huge collection of memorabilia. Sheltering the finest works of Gaugin, Monet, Rodin, Renoir, Da Vinci, Rembrandt, Michelangelo and Rubens, this museum is a pure treat for the eyes.

Extensive architecture of the British Museum makes way for the incredible collection of the Chinese, Asian, Aztec and Classical art pieces. Letting people enter for free, this museum has relics from every civilization in the world. It gives you a lesson in history, a recap of a thousand years in a few hours! Where else would you drive such an easy bargain?

The MET, popularly known as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is one of the most famous buildings in the city of New York and is synonymous with ancient and modern art. The museum is huge, so a careful planning is recommended when you visit it.

Uffizi Gallery which is located in Florence, Italy is a real treat. Masterpieces like The Birth of Venus and Primavera greet you upon your arrival. Not only does this museum come as a blast from the past, but the city paints a wonderful picture for tourists and residents alike. This one should be an important one on your list.

National Gallery of Art is strategically divided into two buildings that house different collections from different time periods. The west building houses exhibits from Europe that date before the 19th century and the East building is home to modern art and one can see Picasso, Warhol and Lichtenstein adorning the walls.

The museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, USA, is known to be one of the most influential and important museums dedicated to modern art in our times. An honor so prestigious, one has to see it to believe it. Contemporary art, fine art and new media are regular features there.

When we dip into the rich variety of novels, poems, and plays which constitute English Literature we are reading works which have lasted for generations, or centuries, and they have lasted because they are good. These works say something worth saying, and say it with artistry strong enough to survive while lesser works drop into obscurity.

Literature is part of our cultural heritage which is freely available to everyone, and which can enrich our lives in all kinds of ways. Once we have broken the barriers that make studying literature seem daunting, we find that literary works can be entertaining, beautiful, funny, or tragic. They can convey profundity of thought, richness of emotion, and insight into character. They take us beyond our limited experience of life to show us the lives of other people at other times. They stir us intellectually and emotionally, and deepen our understanding of our history, our society, and our own individual lives.

Literature can also give us glimpses of much earlier ages. Glimpses of Celtic Ireland in the poetry of W. B. Yeats, or of the Romans in Shakespeare’s plays, for example, can take us in our imaginations back to the roots of our culture, and the sense of continuity and change we get from surveying our history enhances our understanding of our modern world.

Literature can enrich our experience in other ways too. London, for example, is all the more interesting a city when behind what we see today we see the London known to Dickens, Boswell and Johnson, or Shakespeare. And our feeling for nature can be deepened when a landscape calls to mind images from, say, Wordsworth, Thomas Hardy, or Ted Hughes.

The world of English literature consists, apart from anything else, of an astonishing array of characters, from the noble to the despicable – representations of people from all walks of life engaged in all kinds of activities. Through their characters great authors convey their insights into human nature, and we might find that we can better understand people we know if we recognise in them characteristics we have encountered in literature. Perhaps we see that a certain man’s behaviour resembles that of Antony in Antony and Cleopatra, or a certain woman is rather like The Wife of Bath in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Seeing such similarities can help us to understand and accept other people.

Good works of literature are not museum pieces, preserved and studied only for historical interest. They last because they remain fresh, transcending as well as embodying the era in which they were written. Each reader reading each work is a new and unique event and the works speak to us now, telling us truths about human life which are relevant to all times.

We don’t have to read far before we find that a writer has portrayed a character who is in some way like us, confronting life-experiences in some way like our own and when we find ourselves caught up with the struggles of a character perhaps we are rehearsing the struggles to come in our own lives. And when we are moved by a poem it can enrich us by putting words to feelings which had lain dormant for lack of a way of expressing them, or been long-forgotten in the daily round of the workplace, the supermarket, the traffic jam, and the TV News.

So why do we need to study English Literature, instead of just reading it? Well, we don’t need to, but when visiting a country for the first time it can help to have books by people who have been there before by our side.

When we start to read literature, particularly older works, we have to accept that we are not going to get the instant gratification that we have become used to from popular entertainment. We have to make an effort to accommodate to the writer’s use of language, and to appreciate the ideas he is offering. Critics can help us make that transition, and can help fill out our understanding by telling us something about the social climate in which a work was written, or about the personal circumstances of the author while he was writing it.

We are not going to enjoy every literary work, and there may be times when we find reading a critic is more interesting than reading the actual work. Reading the work of a good critic can be edifying in itself. Making the effort to shape our own thoughts into an essay is also an edifying experience, and just as good literature lasts, so do the personal benefits that we gain from studying and writing about it.

Whether we choose to study it or read it for pleasure, when we look back over our literature we are looking back over incredible richness. Not just museum pieces, but living works which we can buy in bookshops, borrow from the library, or download from the internet and read today, right now.