1 . Cassandra Campbell has narrated (叙述) 900 audiobooks (有声读物), so it comes as no surprise that it’s a pleasure to interview her by phone, with a voice that’s both comfortable and powerful. Her recent projects include Golem Girl by Riva Lehrer, True Story by Kate Reed Petty and Eat the Buddha by Barbara Demick, but she is perhaps best known for her narration of Where the Crawdads Sing, which is now in its 27th month on the best-seller list for audio stories.

Set in North Carolina’s marshlands (湿地), Delia Owens’ popular story is also in its 118th week on the hardcover fiction list. “My mum grew up there, so I’ve done a lot of books set there,” says Campbell, a Connecticut native whose two interests, acting and reading, were inspired by her father’s work as a theatre critic for The Hart ford Courant.

She says she was recording voice-overs (画外音) for a TV show—which I was terrible at—when a friend helped her get an audition with an audiobook publisher (出版商). “I thought this was the perfect marriage: getting to play all the parts and reading the book,” she adds.

Campbell has never had any contact with Owens, but she feels closely connected with the story of a motherless girl who is left to take care of herself in the wild. “There was one section where the girl goes out of the marsh, and it was so beautifully written and so clear,” she says. “The scientific descriptions of the natural world were really attractive to me.”

Like many experienced narrators, Campbell has a recording room at her home in Sherman Oaks, California. “It’s in the garage (车库), and it’s not attractive.” The setup allows for a pleasing transition to fully faraway work during the pandemic (流行病). And the state of being separate allows her to disappear further into the story, an experience she describes as part consideration, part communication with the language.

5 . A Squiggle Is Just A Squiggle

by KJ Parish          $ 14. 99 Format—Paperback, PDF          Made In—USA

Categories—Books, Children’s Books

ALSO AVAILABLE ON THESE PLATFORMS

Amuzon, Apple Books, China-Pub

A squiggle—a mere wiggly (弯曲) line—is just a squiggle. But sometimes, if you look at a squiggle in a certain way, it can seem like something MORE—something SERIOUS! ! ! A Squiggle Is Just A Squiggle explores the limitless potential of the human imagination while introducing basic mindfulness skills.

The Book That Makes No Sense

by Melanie Berliet       $ 14. 99       Format—Paperback, PDF   Made In—USA

Categories—Books, Children’s Books

ALSO AVAILABLE ON THESE PLATFORMS

Amazon, Kindle, Apple Books

This book was inspired by one of the greatest joys of parenting a toddler: The fact that they make NO sense. It is a celebration of “toddler brain”—that magical, stream-of-consciousness way they seem to process the world around them. In The Book That Makes No Sense, you will find we accompany an imaginative young child on a journey of learning and discovery.

You Are Not A Princess (And That’s Ok! )

by Melanie Berliet       Featuring full-color illustrations by Saskia Wariner       $ 14. 99

Format—Paperback, PDF       Made In—Germany

Categories—Books, Children’s Books

ALSO AVAILABLE ON THESE PLATFORMS

Kindle, Amazon

This delightful picture book encourages: small girls to aspire to more in life than becoming a princess. It promotes critical thinking, creativity, and emotional intelligence and offers bigger dreams for the reader to consider, like becoming an astronaut, fire-fighter, or archeologist. Princess imagery is so heavily marketed to young girls especially, and this book is such a welcome relief as it offers an alternative narrative.

A Girl’s Guide To Life

by Michelle Herman       $ 12. 95 Format—Hardcover

Categories—Books, Children’s Books

ALSO AVAILABLE ON THESE PLATFORMS

Apple Books

A Girl’s Guide to Life by Michelle Herman is a timeless book of warm and sensible advice for young girls, originally written by a mother for her own eight-year-old daughter. A Girl’s Guide to Life is exactly that—a delightful guide filled with wisdom and warmth for all ages. It’s about saying yes and saying no and everything in between, giving respect and expecting it too. Practical proverbs in a fun-to-read package.

7 . I grew up on a university campus in eastern Nigeria.I was a(n) _________reader, and what I read were British and American children’s books.I began to write when I was seven.I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading: All my _________ were white and blue-eyed. They played in the snow. They ate apples, and they talked a lot about the _________，how lovely it was that the sun had _________.

What this demonstrates is how _________we can be influenced by what we read, particularly as children. Because all I had read were foreign books, I had become _________ that books had to have _________ in them and had to be about things with which I could not personally identify.

Things _________ when I discovered African books. There weren’t many of them available, and they weren’t quite as easy to _________ as the foreign books.

But __________ writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye I went through a mental __________in my view of literature.I __________ that people like me, girls with skin the color of chocolate,could also __________ in literature. I started to write about things I recognized. What the __________ of African writers did for me was this: It saved me from having a __________ story of what books are.

8 . Reading is a great exercise for the mind. It helps kids calm down and relax, opening doors of new knowledge to enlighten their minds. Kids who read grow up to have better cognitive (认知的) skills. Reading is good for everyone, not only children or young adults. You will find many lists with up to 30 reasons why reading is important. Our expert librarians selected the year’s best books for kids, teens, and adults. Check out these outstanding titles and choose what your kids might be interested in.

Hurricane Summer By Asha Bromfield

Tilla’s mother says you get two birthdays-One the day you are born and the other when you give birth to yourself. While visiting Jamaica, Illa faces a storm of dark secrets that threaten to unravel her life while an actual storm threatens the lives of those she loves.

Darling By K. Ancrum

When a boy named Peter appears at Wendy Darling’s window and invites her to join him and his friends for a night out in Chicago, she eagerly agrees. But as the night slowly gets out of control, not even Wendy can predict the secrets she’ll uncover.

The Dire Days of Willow weep Manor By Shaenon K. Garrity

It is illustrated (作插图) by Christopher Baldwin. Gothic romance superfan Haley saves a stranger from drowning and wakes up at Willow weep Manor, which embodies the settings of her favorite books. Willow weep hides a device that prevents evil from entering our world-but it’s falling apart.

The Cost of Knowing By Brittney Morris

With the power to see the future of anything-or anyone-he touches, Alex deals with extreme worry.But when he gets a vision of his brother’s death in just a few days’ time, Alex has to reconnect with his brother and see if he can stop what he knows is coming.

9 . Unusual Libraries Around the World

There are 2.7 million libraries spreading across the globe, and while there are many beautiful ones, there are also a number of unique ones.

The Haskell Free Library and Opera House, a special library spanning two countries, is stationed on the border between Canada and the United States and serves people from both countries. The main entrance is on the American side, but the majority of collection of the books are in Canada. There’s even an official American-Canada borderline running right across the library’s floor.

Praised by many as a library of the future, the Deichman Bjørvika, city of Oslo’s new main library, has one hundred unread and unpublished texts. They are stored in a specially designed room lined with wood from the forest, making the library the world’s most secretive one. It witnesses different authors add their works to the collection that will not be available for reading until 2114.

Quietly sitting on an isolated (孤零零的) stretch of beach of Qinhuangdao in northern China, the Seashore Library has been called the world’s loneliest library. People have to walk across the sand to reach the doors. The building is designed to promote people’s connection with ocean, so the main reading room features a layered design to ensure that everyone has a good view of the sea.

Bíbliotheca Alexandrina is considered as a revival (复兴) of an ancient library in the Alex-andria 2,300 years ago or so. Characterized by its circular, tilting form, the building spans 160 meters in diameter (直径) and reaches up to 32 meters in height, while also diving some 12 meters into the ground.

Jack Rosenthal is the author of “Teen Investing”, the #2 book on teen investing (投资) on Amazon. He wrote Teen Entrepreneurship as a way to educate other teenagers on what it takes to create their own companies. Jack Rosenthal is currently a 19-year-old student at Babson College in Massachusetts.He’sbeen an entrepreneur and investor for the last 10 years and has worked on numerous businesses.

You AreWhat You Riskis aloud call for a new conversation about our relationship with risk and uncertainty, Inthisground-breaking book, Michele Wucker examines why it’s so important to understand your risk fingerprint and howto make your risk relationship work better in business, life, and the world.

Millions of people visit xkcd.com each week to read Randall Munroe’s webcomic (网络漫画). His drawings about science, technology, language, and love have a huge following, as do his deeply researched answers to his fans’ strangest questions. The book features (以……为特色) new and never-before-answered questions, along with the most popular answers from the website.

Doing what someone else already knows how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But when you do something new, you go from 0 to 1. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. Tomorrow’s champions will not win by competing in today’s marketplace. They will escape competition altogether, because their businesses will be unique.