1 . Four Popular Books on Science

This book written by Graham Lawton is not about what happens when we’re ill with something serious to send us to the doctor. Instead, it focuses on many of mild, annoying illnesses, aches and pains which we can always put up with. It’s a mixture of science and history, with a light touch, and provides practical information about each illness for the reader.

In this deeply researched book, Professor Bobby Duffy provides a new framework for understanding the issues of the day: from culture wars to climate change and mental health to housing. Including information from all over the globe, and with powerful effects on humanity’s future, this big-thinking book will change how you view the world.

Introduced by Jim Al-Khalili, Eureka brings together 365 mind blowing questions, attractive facts and exciting experiments. If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if the moon disappeared, why cats always land on their feet, why we get morning breath, how to measure the speed of light with a chocolate bar, if you could surf down an erupting volcano and why songs get stuck in your head, this book would be a good choice.

Unthinkable takes us on an unforgettable journey through the human brain. Award-winning science writer Helen Thomson has spent years travelling the world tracking down brain disorders that are not seen very often. In Unthinkable she tells the stories of nine unusual people. From the man who thinks he’s a tiger to the doctor who feels the pain of others just by looking at them. Their experiences show how the brain can shape our lives in unexpected and, in some cases, alarming ways.

2 . When visiting a park, it is common to observe older individuals listening to audio (有声的) books instead of reading traditional books. Audio books have become quite popular these days.     1     Is listening to an audio book just as beneficial as reading a book?

    2     Reading needs us to focus all our attention on the words in a book. We also need to find time and a specific place to sit down and read. However, audio books provide flexibility and allow individuals to engage in other activities while listening. And it gives your eyes a break, too.

But the big question is, do we get knowledge from audio books as effectively as we do from paper books?     3     Volunteers in group one were asked to listen to an audio book while volunteers in group two read a book of the same content. Surprisingly, both groups recalled the same amount of information, whether they listened to it or read it.

Another study published in the Journal of Neuroscience further supported the result above. In the study, researchers scanned (扫描) people’s brains when they listened to and read books.     4    

Some people still believe that they learn better from reading paper books. One reason might be that when we listen to audio books, we are often multitasking. If you’re trying to learn while doing two things, you’re not going to learn as well.     5     It is important to avoid it while listening to audio books to ensure best learning outcomes.

3 . Reading is a healthy habit that everyone should develop from childhood because of the benefits that come with it.     1     Therefore, take your time and start by reading slowly. The following will discuss the effects of not reading books, so you can basically consider and judge where you are and understand how reading can be beneficial.

    2     People who don’t read and don’t like to read find it harder to learn than people who actually read. For example, most students who fail to develop a reading habit find it difficult to get through school. This then leads to students dropping out, which is bad for society. Reading is a habit that strengthens the brain and develops your inborn love of wanting to learn more. Therefore, not being addicted to books closes you off from this.

Narrow mindedness. Reading a variety of books broadens the readers’ mind. Most people who don’t read have a certain narrow mindedness to them that can easily be noticed.     3     When you don’t read, you’re forced to take everything at face value and then create and shape your views in this way.

Low brain power. One advantage of reading is its ability to improve brain function. Reading can help people become better thinkers and use brains more effectively. People who don’t read usually have low brain power because they don’t exercise the brain as much as readers do.     4    

Poor imagination. Reading books allows you to tap into your imaginative power.     5     This is important because it expands (拓展) your thought process as well as the ability to understand. People who don’t read books usually are short of the inspiration necessary to create imagination. This makes it difficult to be creative.

4 . I came across the book Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less from a library app and I can say that after reading, it did not disappoint.

The book fits into the personal development category. It talks about how important it is to focus on absolutely important things and remove the unnecessary distractions. The common problem, Greg McKeown says, is spotting the important things. Essentialism means continuously defining where we can create the most value, then finding ways to execute these tasks most effortlessly.

In Essentialism, McKeown draws on experience and insight from working with the leaders of the most innovative companies in the world to show how to achieve the pursuit of less. More importantly, by applying a more selective standard for what is essential, the pursuit of less allows us to regain control of our own choices so we can channel our time, energy and effort into making the highest possible contribution toward the goals and activities that matter.

McKeown further explores the difference between an essentialist and a non-essentialist. He gives fantastic and relatable examples from his life as well as from others to illustrate how functioning as a non-essentialist is harmful for both you and those around you. He says the primary difference in both of them is the one who says yes to everything and the other (the essentialist) says yes only to the things that matter.

He also tells that a non-essentialist will commit to everything and put his personal priorities (优先事项) on the side while that is opposite in case of the essentialist. Whether it is in work-life or personal life, a non-essentialist will try to do more by quick-fix solutions but an essentialist will focus on removing barriers and nothing else. He also gives us examples of famous people like Mahatma Gandhi who followed essentialism.

Finally, the book tells us how to set out the important things in our life — like a routine of 8 hours of sleep, daily journal or playing or relaxing every day to let our minds rest. In today’s fast-paced life, McKeown says, restfulness is a precious escape from the noisy world.

6 . The printed book is back. Recent studies have shown that students remember more information when they read a paper book compared to reading an e-book. One school responded to these findings by ditching its e-readers. The students found that “the ease of navigation (导航)” was greater when using a traditional book.

I love the way we now judge printed books using the language of the digital world. E-books may come with “navigational tools,” but it turns out the best navigational tools are the “devices” at the ends of your arms. You can use them to flip the pages forward and backward.   

Fans of digital books may point out that e-readers have a handy “search” tool. Old-fashioned books also have a search function, in which you turn back to the opening part to help you remember the hero’s name. They even have a “bookmark system,” which uses something called a “bookmark.”

Can a traditional book offer all the features of an e-book? Alas, no. It has no “progress bar (进度条)” indicating how much of the book has been read. Luckily, a clever tip is available: turn your book so that it can be viewed from the side or top. It will naturally form two parts joined in the middle. If the left part is thicker than the right one, you are more than halfway through.

Admittedly, e-books are lighter than paper books, but one must question whether this is really an advantage. In secondary school my body figure was actually transformed by the daily need to carry textbooks. For me and my fellow students, these weighty books would draw our shoulders back and our chests forward.

Educational fashions come and go, so maybe the return of traditional books won’t last. But for the moment, I find myself welcoming their wonderful return.

7 . Not long ago, Linda Khan was sitting by a hospital bed in Houston, feeling ill at ease. Beside her lay her 88-year-old father, who needed surgery.

What troubled her almost as much as his health was the fact that all day the two of them had engaged in nothing but depressing small talk. She and her father had always had good conversations, but now his once wide-ranging interests seemed to have shrunk to the size of the room. He talked about the terrible hospital food, the tests, the doctors, the diagnosis, the potential outcomes. “It is really hard to sit with a person in a hospital,” Khan says. “It feels like there’s nothing to talk about except their medical situation.”

That day in the hospital, her eye fell on a pile of books that people had brought as gifts. Her father had always been a reader, but lately he didn’t have the energy or focus. She picked up Young Titan, Michael Shelden’s biography of Winston Churchill, and started to read it out loud. “Right away it changed the mood and atmosphere,” she says. That afternoon, Khan read to her father for an hour. It was a relief and a pleasure for both of them. Reading gave the daughter a way to connect with her father and help him in a situation that was otherwise out of her hands. Listening allowed the father to travel on the sound of his daughter’s voice, and back into the realm of mature, intellectual engagement, where he felt himself again.

“He’s in and out of the hospital a lot now,” Khan says, “and I always read to him. ”That may be just what the doctor ordered. In a 2010 survey in the United Kingdom, elderly adults who joined weekly read-aloud groups reported better concentration, less anxiety, and an improved ability to socialize. The survey authors believed these improvements were in large part due to the “rich, varied, nonprescriptive diet of serious literature” that group members consumed, with fiction encouraging feelings of relaxation and calm, poetry promoting focused concentration, and narratives of all sorts giving rise to thoughts, feelings, and memories.

8 . Birds do it. People do it. Owls do it in the daytime. Even Caenorhabditis elegans, a primitive roundworm made up of a few thousand cells, does something that looks an awful lot like it. Sleep is an ancient, universal experience.

But partly because it is so commonplace, for a long time sleep was a subject that scientists had not woken up to. It is only in the past half-century or so that it has attracted the attention of dedicated researchers. A new book from Kenneth Miller, a science journalist, sets out to elaborate the field’s short but fascinating history. The book is organized around the life and hard work of a scientist named Nathaniel Kleitman who set up a pioneering sleep-research programme at the University of Chicago.

The early pages of the book, before there is much in the way of established science to describe, are the weakest. A good deal of time is spent on biographical details and pen portraits of the world through which Kleitman moved. But the story soon picks up. It ranges from the discovery of rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep and circadian rhythms — the biological clocks that govern humanity’s days — to the effects of sleep deprivation (which can be fatal, at least in lab animals). It also probes the purpose, if any, of dreams.

Underlying it all is a sense of psychology's slow maturing as a science. New technologies such as electroencephalographs, which monitor electrical activity in the brain, have offered practitioners the ability to study brains directly, rather than trying to infer what they are doing from the behaviour of their owners.

Discoveries often lead to new questions in turn. That is why neat, tidy endings are hard to achieve in science books; this one is no difference. Despite all the progress of the past 50 years, scientists are still unsure what sleep is for. For anyone curious about asking the right questions, however, Mr. Miller’s book is a good place to start.

9 . My three grandchildren grew up, listening to someone read and learning to read. They discovered Jeanne Birdsall, Ben Hatke, Sara Penny packer and Rick Riordan. I read and loved — many of the books. Often, I was reminded of my running story.

I started running when my older daughter was in primary school. During those early days, she made her disrespect for running clear. Later she did run. She ran throughout high school and had been running ever since. We often ran together. At first, I slowed down for her. But very soon, her pace improved, and she was slowing down for me.

Now I compared this with my reading grandchildren. At first, adults-parents,grandparents and teachers-led the way. Then the kids learned to read, and soon they were mere specks in the distance, gulping down books we’d never heard of, referring to series we’d never come across.

Early on, I began preparing myself for the inevitable. The era of cozy reading sessions would end.Indeed, it ended,in the case of my granddaughter. She and her mother still read together, but mostly she read on her own. My grandsons also read like they breathed-in the car, at the table, while walking from the parking lot to the ball field and back again, eyes on their books.

I trailed behind them this summer as they collected a heaping pile of books from the library. They sustained them through ten days in the Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks. The night before our flight home, each of them were read, some more than once.

Recently, I picked up a book once owned by a child who was now these boys’ uncle. I began reading aloud during a moment of wild enjoyment, and within minutes both boys were beside me on the couch, listening to narrator Ludlow Fitch describe a terrifying attack and his escape to the tiny village of Pagus Parvus.