【推荐2】Steven Spielberg never fails to blow us away with his imagination.

The US director’s latest film Ready Player One, which was released in Chinese cinemas on March 30, is a story set in the year 2045, when people escape their hopeless everyday lives by putting on a VR mask and entering a virtual world named Oasis. This fantasy land is filled with characters and settings right out of classic films and video games. At the age of 71, Spielberg is still at the top of his game.

Indeed, Spielberg has always been a “gamer” himself—or more precisely, a “game changer”. When his thriller Jaws came out in 1975, it struck a chord with audiences all around the world and even kept people from going swimming for fear of the “teeth in the sea”. The film was also an example of what we know as summer hits. And again in 1982 his alien film E. T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Spielberg challenged people’s belief that aliens are something to be feared by telling a story about a loving friendship between a space culture and a little boy.

Now comes Ready Player One. When Wade Watts, the film’s teenager leading figure, finally prevents Oasis from falling into the wrong hands, he is given ownership of the virtual world by its late designer James Haliday. But Watts makes a decision that he hopes will make people want to appreciate their real lives, instead of spending all their free time escaping reality in Oasis, which is a real life message that Spielberg is trying to deliver to the audience.

【推荐3】Have you ever wished you could solve complex math problems without thinking? What about learning to play the piano in just three days? Or mastering several foreign languages within a month?

Eddie Morra, the main character in the movieLimitlesscan do all these things. But he isn’t Superman or Harry Potter. Eddie has taken pills called NZT.

ThrillerLimitless came out in China on October 13. In the movie, Eddie is faced with “writer’s block”. He hasn’t written a single word of a novel, and his deadline has passed. And there’s more bad news: his girlfriend breaks up with him. By chance, Eddie runs into a relative who is a drug dealer. He gives Eddie some pills called NZT that allow people to make use of 100 percent of their brains. With the magic pills, Eddie’s life changes completely. He can recall everything he has ever read, seen or heard. He gains a sixth sense that allows him to predict future events. He even becomes a kungfu master by simply memorizing actions in Bruce Lee’s movie.

Before long he has finished his novel, won back his girlfriend and stepped into the financial world. He becomes rich incredibly quickly and is soon employed by a powerful Wall Street company. However, bad side effects are just around the corner. The effects of the pill last for only one or two days, and Eddie has to find more supplies of the pills. Meanwhile, the pills start to have other effects on him. Eddies’ mind loses the ability to control the actions of his body. What does destiny hold for him? Will he be able to go back to his normal life?

“Eddie’s fate turns out to be a barbed （讽刺的） joke… a sharp-eyed comic fable for an age of greed (贪婪)and speed.” writes A. O. Scott, a movie critic with the New York Times.

The drug isn’t real-----yet, some researchers say such memory-enhancing drugs might not be far off. Would you take such a pill despite its side effects? Is the ability to remember everything a blessing or a curse?

【推荐2】Best Science Fiction

The Sprawl Trilogy by William Gibson

This classic trilogy from william Gibson consists of Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive. The book that started the entire concept of Cyberpunk, the Hugo Award-, Nebula Award-and Philip K. Dick Award-winning Neuromancer remains one of the best sci-fi books ever written and the entire trilogy is worth a read, even if it’s the original that gets all the praise.

Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons

This series by Dan Simmons consists of Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, End ymion and The Rise of Endymion. Truly one of the great works in science fiction history, the Hugo Award-winning Hyperion Cantos is an absolutely excellent story of extreme terror, character-building and wild-world-building that is almost without equal in the type. How we haven’t gotten a proper onscreen adaptation of this series yet, I have no idea, but Perhaps it’s best left in its original, amazing book form.

Ender’s Game Quartet by Orson Scott Card

Ender’s Game is often read in schools, but it has incredibly mature themes like isolation, loneliness, competition and fear- many of which are more relevant now than when Orson Scott Card first began the series in 1985. If you love Ender’s Game, it’s worth reading the whole series to follow the sci-fi adventures of Andrew “Ender” Wiggin: Ender’s Game, Ender in Exile, Xenocide and Children of the Mind.

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

This is the only stand-alone book on this list, as the rest are all in a series, so if you don’t feel like investing in 300, 000 pages of content, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash is for you. This book is the heir ( 继 承 人 ) to Neuromancer’s Cyberpunk throne and an absolutely excellent read from Stephenson. The author uses virtual reality as his setting, and the main character is a pizza deliveryman in one world and a warrior prince in another.

【推荐3】My favorite novel is Albert Camus's The Plague （鼠疫）. It was published in 1947, after Word War II.

On the surface, it's a story about an Algerian coastal town threatened by a mysterious plague. But the symbolic idea works on the concrete presentation of a metaphysical （形而 上学的）problem, which is the cruel fact of suffering. Like the plague, it's just a thing that happens in the world whether we want it to or not. Camus's novel asks if we can think of suffering not as an individual burden but as a shared experience — and maybe turn it into something positive.

The key is to recognize the universality of suffering. A plague is an extraordinary event and the horror it results in is extraordinary, too. But suffering is anything but extraordinary. Every day you leave the house, something terrible could happen. The same is true for all. All of us are subject to forces over which we have no control.

A pandemic （大流行病）forces us to think about our responsibilities to the people around us. The hero of The Plague is a committed doctor named Rieux. From the very beginning, Rieux devotes himself to resisting the plague that united its victims. Each character in the story is defined （刻画）by what they do when the plague comes. No one escapes it, but those who reduce the suffering of others are the most fulfilled. The only villains are those who cannot see beyond themselves. The plague, for these people, is either an excuse to flee or an opportunity to make profits. Because they can't see that their condition is shared, a spirit of unity is completely                                                     foreign to them. And that blindness makes community impossible.

At the very end of The Plague, Camus stated his philosophy that the struggle against suffering is never over for good. The plague will return, and so will everything else that upsets humans. But the point of the book is that a shared struggle is what makes community possible in the first place.

A pandemic, terrible though it is, highlights our mutual interdependence in a way that only tragedy can. The beauty of The Plague is that it asks the reader to map the lessons of the pandemic onto everyday life. The principles that drive the hero, Rieux, are the same principles that make every society worthwhile —understanding, love and unity.

If we learn these lessons, in a moment of crisis, we'll all be better off on the other side of it.