5 . I was trained as a gymnast in Hunan, China, in the 1970s. The government wanted to transfer (转学) me to a school for athletes while my parents wanted me to become an engineer, because they firmly believed there was only one sure way to happiness: a safe and well-paid job. But my dream was to become a Chinese opera singer. Although I tried everything I could to go to opera school, I knew I was too old to be trained and my dream would never come true.

But that’s so unfair. So I was determined to find another calling — books. I satisfied my hunger for parental advice from the Fu Lei’s Family Letters by Fu Lei and Zhu Meifu, found my role model of an independent woman from Jane Eyre, learned to be efficient from Cheaper by the Dozen, and inspired myself to study abroad after reading Complete Works of Sanmao and Lessons from History.

I came to the U. S. in 1995 where I started comparative reading. Comparing and contrasting give scholars a more complete understanding of a topic. So I thought, well, if comparative reading works for research, why not do it in daily life too? So I started reading books in pairs. They can be about people who are involved in the same event — Benjamin Franklin by Walter Isaacson and John Adams by David McCullough, for example, or friends with shared experiences. I also compare the same stories in different genres or similar stories from different cultures, as Joseph Campbell did in his wonderful book The Power of Myth.

Books have given me a magic portal (入口) to connect with people of the past and the present. I have come to believe that coming true is not the only purpose of a dream. Its most important purpose is to get us in touch with where dreams come from, where passion comes from and where happiness comes from. Even a shattered (遭受极大打击的) dream can do that for you. So may books be always with you.

6 . Well-known author and Henrico resident Meg Medina, who won the 2019 Newbery Medal, today was named National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature for 2023~2024. Medina’s most recent book, Merci Suárez Plays It Cool, was published in August 2022, concluding her middle-school trilogy(三部曲). Medina, who has also written picture books and fiction for older teens, will travel throughout the USA, sharing her platform “Cuéntame!: Let’s Talk Books.”

Medina will meet with children at every grade level for conversations about the books they love to read, encouraging them to move beyond talking about a book’s title and basic plot points to how it made them feel or how it’s similar-or dissimilar-to their own lives.

The ambassador program is mainly sponsored by the Library of Congress. Clay Smith, director of library initiatives for the Library of Congress, says ambassadors have to be able to speak to others about reading and writing and to communicate with children in particular. That’s where Medina shines, he says. “She knows how kids think and how they talk,” Smith says. “She’s able to access what’s happening with kids today.”

Smith says that since the turn of the century, there’s been a surge in literature for children, first at the high school level and then during the middle school readers. Additionally, there’re also a larger diversity of authors writing for children, which leads to plotlines and characters that more accurately reflect the country as a whole. “There’s been a push for diversity”, Smith says. “The options should be out there for children to read stories about people who look like them”

Medina agrees children should be empowered to choose the books they want to read for pleasure. She hopes the conversations she has with children about books create the same satisfaction she felt as a child, while encouraging more discussion.

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.

Reading a paper book may be a forgotten luxury for many people thanks to today’s busy lifestyles, but listening to a book, while shopping or jogging, is a growing trend. Now, audio books can be easily downloaded from the Internet at the same, if not lower, prices as the print editions.

10 . Three mornings a week, Iona walks six blocks from Eastern High School to Payne Elementary School. She ________ at the front desk just after 8: 30 a. m. and makes her way to a ________ , where she’ll be teaching second-and third-graders who are full of energy after the school day.

Iona, a senior at Eastern High, ________ this work back in the ninth grade. It’s run by Reach, a Washington D. C. nonprofit, which trains high school ________ like her to be reading tutors (教师) for elementary school students. It’s a tutoring program that works in two ________ . It’s serving a(n) ________ need in the city: Two-thirds of students in D. C. public schools can’t ________ and write at grade level when they start high school. Reach ________ these older students to become ________ readers by giving them the tools to teach younger kids.

Tutoring programs that ________ younger and older students are ________ . But most rely on ________ students. Reach turns the ________ on its head: Most of the teenage tutors start the ________ reading between the fourth-and sixth-grade level... The tutors ________ training in literacy (读写能力) instruction and they’re ________ as role models. With Reach, teens are given the ________ of helping a younger student. That’s a big ________ for them.

Iona says she ________ reading a lot more than she did when she started almost four years ago. She hasn’t decided on her future plans, but she does ________ one thing: She wants to work with kids.