2 . San Francisco Park ranger Amanda Barrows, who registered in City College of San Francisco (CCSF)’s Poetry for the People class, began to place a nightstand (床头柜) in Golden Gate Park with a note “take a poem, leave a poem” in December 2022. Since then, over 100 handwritten poems have been placed in the nightstand. “It’s completely unexpected,” said Barrows. “I’m really taken aback by the outpouring of support.”

Park ranger by day and poet by night, Barrows said she began writing and attending poetry workshops in 2020. The poetry course she attended was founded by Leslie Simon in 1975. The class advocates for a focus on the neighborhood, and the cultivation (培养) and public presentation of new poems. For Barrows, the idea that she could combine her job and her hobby by bringing poetry into parks was an inspiration. Barrows asked her friends to contribute their favorite poems to the nightstand as poems that could be taken.

Armed with an old nightstand, Barrows filled the stand with pens and paper. An added drawer at the bottom holds the poems that people “donate”. The concept reminded her of Little Free Libraries, which are fixtures across the city. “I was having anxiety. I had no idea what I was going to do; then it sort of just came to me,” said Barrows. “I was inspired by the little free libraries you see in SF, where you ‘take a book, leave a book’, and thought, ‘Maybe I could do this with poetry.’”

One of the teachers at the CCSF poetry course, Lauren Muller, told The Washington Post that “people need poetry now”, which she suggested as the reason for the success of Barrows’s project.

Past student projects included writing poetry on sidewalks in chalk and placing poems on the windshields (挡风玻璃) of cars. “It’s exciting to see the work that students are doing,” Muller continued. “My hope is that this will happen across city parks… elsewhere.”

Today, I would like to recommend a book to you, which taught me an important lesson about prejudice and racism.     1     The story is set in Alabama in the southern US, where the author grew up.

The main character in this novel is a lawyer named Atticus Finch from the American South. The American South in the 1960s was known to be a place where many white people looked down upon black people, except for Finch. When the local judge asked him to defend a black man named Tom Robinson, who was wrongly accused of raping a white woman, Finch agreed.     2     Still, Finch fought to discover the truth, even though he was under threat. He proved that Robinson is innocent (清白的). As Finch’s son Jem and daughter Scout grew up, they started to see more racial prejudice around them.     3    

The author Lee was born in Monroeville, Alabama in 1926. In her childhood, she, like Scout and Jem, learned about racial prejudice and the damage it could do. To Kill a Mockingbird was her first and only novel published.     4    

For me, the most memorable quotes in the book are “Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but… sing their hearts out for us.     5    ” The description of childhood innocence in the story through Scout and Jem is connected with the dark evils of prejudice in the town, which provides a dramatic contrast and enables you to understand how dangerous racism and prejudice are. I want to recommend this book because it contains slightly complex and interesting sentence structures. It is a book that you will never forget.

Recently, 16 Chinese online novels have entered a     1     (collect) in the British Library, including My Heroic Husband, Up in the Heaven and so on.     2     (cover) themes of science fiction, history, reality and fantasy, these works represent the classics of Chinese online literature over the past 20 and more years.

The British Library usually collects works     3     appeal to readers or when the books’ value is considered high. Now readers can check the information of the 16 books     4     the library’s website and borrow printed copies.

As the Chinese online literature industry has     5     (gradual) matured after two-decade development, it has received increasing acknowledgment from home and abroad. It has also attracted     6     increasing number of readers from overseas. One of     7     (large) online literature platforms, China Literature Group, has authorized the digital and print copyrights of more than 800 online novels to overseas.

China Literature’s international portal Webnovel,     8     (establish) in 2017, has seen nearly 100 million readers access     9     (it) library of more than 2,600 works that     10     (translate) from Chinese. Also, more than 300,000 writers from around the world have created over 420,000 works online.