1 . Imagine that you take a walk around your yard or nearby park and immediately, the sounds of an insect band surround you. Produced by the muscular movements of insects called treehopper (角蝉), this imagined soundscape comes from vibrations(共鸣、振动)that flow across the surface of plants. But it is not at all like the familiar vocalizations of crickets(蟋蟀); instead, it’s something richer, more varied. Some sounds are song-like, others are similar to the noises of machines or musical instruments. The noise made from even a single plant may be “as noisy as a busy street”.

In An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, Pulitzer prize-winning science journalist Ed Yong explains that, on a real walk instead of this one we’ve imagined, humans would not be able to hear the treehoppers’ music without special equipment. In the company of scientists with a laser vibrometer(振动计), a device that changes the treehopper vibrations into sounds audible to human ears, Yong gets to hear them in the wild and in the laboratory. He is shocked by the attractive sounds.

In this book that follows on from 2018’s I Contain Multitudes, Yong writes in a perfect balance of scientific severity and personal awe as he invites readers to grasp something of how other animals experience the world. Communicating through surface vibrations is a rather cool example that extends beyond treehoppers to elephants and spiders, and to this fact about frogs. Attuned to vibrations entering the eggs, frog hatches quickly if a snake shows up with a hard bite, but ignore rain, wind, footsteps and even an earthquake.

My admiration for the book is, well, immense. Like many thousands of other people, I have relied throughout the course of COVID-19 on Yong’s reporting at The Atlantic as he cracked open the fast-changing world of pandemic science. Now, with An Immense World, Yong brings into beautiful focus a host of other animal sensory worlds that co-exist with ours, and how we may protect them.

9 . 2021 brought us some amazing titles. If you want to read the books that people couldn’t stop talking about that year, see below for our list of some of them!

Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri

An extraordinary new novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Lowland and Interpreter of Maladies — her first in nearly a decade—about a woman questioning her place in the world, hesitating between inactivity and movement, between the need to belong and the refusal to form lasting ties.

Hardcover: $24. 00

The Paper Palace by Miranda Heller

A story of summer, secrets, love and lies: in the course of a single day on Cape Cod, one woman must make a life-changing decision that she has been preparing for decades. Gentle yet disastrous, The Paper Palace considers the tensions between desire and dignity, the legacies of abuse, and the crimes of families.

Hardcover: $27.00

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

A great new novel from Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro. Klara and the Sun is a thrilling book that offers a look at our changing world through the eyes of Klara—an artificial friend with outstanding observational qualities— and one that explores the fundamental question: what does it mean to love?

Hardcover: $26.00

The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green

A deeply moving collection of personal essays from John Green, the author of The Fault in Our Stars and Turtles All the Way Down. John Green’s gift for storytelling shines throughout this masteiful collection. The Anthropocene Reviewed is an open-hearted exploration of the paths we create and a celebration of falling in love with the world.

Hardcover: $24.00

10 . Reading is good for more than just entertainment.    1    . And the positive effects can be felt at any age: Even before they’ve fully developed their reading skills, kids can benefit from having access to materials and being read to on a regular basis.

Reading can boost intelligence

People who exhibit strong reading skills early in life grow up to be more intelligent. That was the finding of a study published in 2014 that measured the cognitive development of 1, 890 sets of identical twins. When two twins shared the same genes and home environments, early reading skills appeared to be the factor that decided which twin would be better at both verbal tests (like vocabulary( and non-verbal (like reasoning tests).     2    , the study authors concluded that more emphasis should be placed on teaching strong reading skills to young children.

Reading helps increase empathy

    3    — it can make you a kinder person as well. According to a study published in 2013, people who consume literary fiction have an easier time sensing and relating to emotions in other people. This effect likely has something to do with the way such books are written: Great literature forces readers to steps outside themselves and empathize with the characters they’re reading about. Reading can lower stress

Feel stressed at the end of a long day?    4    . A 2009 study found that reading for just 30 minutes has similar stress-reducing effects to doing 30 minutes of yoga.

    5    

Even after you put down a book, the effects of reading it are still present in your brain. A 2013 study discovered that when people read books, their brains continue to behave differently hours and even days later. The brains of readers show increased connectivity in the left temporal cortex — the region responsible for language receptivity — even hours after they’ve stopped reading. This suggests that reading can train the mind and boost neural function through a process that’s similar to muscle memory.