The Supreme Leader — or someone in his office — has used Ayatollah Khamenei’s Twitter account to give advice and recommendations on books and reading, complaining that not enough people bother to take the time to read these days:

The Supreme Leader asks:

Parents can help solve this state of affairs by encouraging their offspring to read, Khamenei says (he does not offer any suggestions for reading, for example the Harry Potter novels):

But it’s not just children who ought to read more. Ordinary Iranians should open a book on a regular basis too, presumably instead of sitting in front of their televisions watching BBC Persian:

For those of us who complain that they don’t have time to read, the Supreme Leader intimates that this is not an acceptable excuse. Why, the Supreme Leader has managed to find the time to read a great deal of books, even in his very few periods of free time:

For example, Khamenei reads while he is riding the bus to Tehran:

And what might he be reading?

The Supreme Leader leaves us with these thoughts: while he values other forms of art such as the cinema — and it is easy to imagine Ayatollah Khamenei enjoying the films of Woody Allen, for example, or perhaps a romantic comedy or two — he prefers a good book: