【推荐1】The years 1347—1351 saw Europe suffer from the worst disease—the Black Death. At least one third of the population in Europe lost their lives. Even the Catholic priests(牧师) with all their influence could not survive either.     1    

Against this background, Giovanni Boccaccio, an Italian writer, decided to collect stories from history to both comfort victims and challenge the church.     2    

In the book,10 people get together at a faraway place to stay away from the disease and share stories there to deal with boredom.     3     After each one finishes their turn, the others then share their ideas on the stories. In this way, we not only enjoy the book’s interesting stories, but also get to know the values held by people at the time.     4     As Chinese President Xi Jinping said, works like The Decameron(《十日谈》) stand against the ignorance of the Middle Ages and reflect the people’s hope for spiritual liberation.

    5     So I could fully understand the characters’feelings of panic when what they used to believe in suddenly fell away. For people in medieval times(中世纪), it was their belief in church. For us today, it might be the certainty of our global systems. But it was from the mess of the Black Death that the Renaissance and humanism were born. In today’s post-pandemic society, new lifestyles, technologies, and other changes have come to life. My most valuable lesson from The Decameron is this: We must learn from the past to better shape our future.

【推荐2】Have you ever felt that reading a good book makes you better able to connect with your fellow human beings? If so, the results of a new scientific study back you up, but only if your reading material is literary fiction (文艺小说).Psychologists David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano, at the New School for Social Research in New York, have proved that reading literary fiction improves the ability to sense and understand other people's feelings.

In a series of five experiments, 1,000 participants were given texts to read, either parts of popular fiction, or more literary texts. The pair then used a variety of Theory of Mind methods to measure how accurately (精确的)the participants could identify feelings in others. Scores were higher for those who had read literary fiction than for those with popular fiction or non-fiction texts.

"What great writers do is to turn you into the writer. In literary fiction, the incompleteness of the characters turns your mind to trying to understand the minds of others,” said Kidd. “Some writing is what you call ‘writerly’, you fill in the gaps and participate, and some is “readerly”, and you’re cheered. We tend to see “readerly” more in fictions like adventure and romance, where the author put down your experience as a reader. Writerly fiction or literary fiction lets you go into a new environment and you have to find your own way,’’ Kidd said.

However, although Castano and Kidd proved that literary fiction improves social empathy (共情) , they were not prepared to use the results to determine whether a piece of writing is worthy of being called literary. “These are aesthetic (美学的)and stylistic concerns which as psychologists we can’t and don’t want to give opinions about,” said Kidd. “Neither do we argue that people should only read literary fiction; it’s just that only literary fiction seems to improve Theory of Mind in the short term. There are likely benefits of reading popular fiction — certainly enjoyment. We just did not measure them.”