5 . “Hello. You are you and I am I. We are people, also known as humans. This makes us different from most of the things on Earth.” This fairly straightforward observation is the opening spread of Like, written by Annie Barrows. It establishes a somewhat odd yet matter-of-fact tone with a young boy addressing the reader.

Matters get more quizzical-or philosophical (哲学意义的), if you prefer—on the following spread, which carefully thinks about the ways in which people are different from one specific thing on Earth, “We are not at all like tin cans. We are not shaped like tin cans. We cannot hold tomato sauce like tin cans. If you open up our lids, nothing good happens. We are not at all like tin cans.” The target audience will no doubt be amused, as was I, and perhaps reassured.

Like next matches people with the swimming pools, “We are a little bit more like a swimming pool than a tin can. We have water and chemicals and dirt inside us. But unlike a swimming pool we don’t have people splashing around inside us.” Mushrooms, we learn, differ from tin cans and swimming pools by being alive, and by growing and reproducing-human traits, too! Mushrooms, however, don’t have mouths and brains. But wait: Hyenas have all that. They run around really fast, like we do... But hyenas don’t say words. They don’t tell stories. They don’t get embarrassed, even when they’re caught eating something off the ground.

Where to go from there? “Look at all these people, the text exclaims over the illustration full of people of seemingly every size, shape, color, age and means of mobility. They are not exactly like us. But they are more like us than they are different.”

“I am more like you than I am like most of the things on Earth, the narrator concludes. I’m glad. I’d rather be like you than a mushroom-an appealing and inarguable understanding.”

7 . The story of a 92-year-old book lover in a village of Chongqing has touched many recently, Sun Shiquan has collected more than 7,000 books over the past years and has offered a free local library to people there for years.

He was born in Pipa Village in Xiuqi Town of Chongqing’s Chengkou County. Being a bookworm as a child, he read all kinds of ancient books including the Four Books and the Five Classics. In the 1950s, he became one of only a handful of local college graduates and later served as a middle school teacher in the county.

He started to collect books in 1983 and gradually built a collection of many kinds over more than 40 years. Among his holdings is a precious set known as the Si Ku Quan Shu, dating back to Qing Dynasty. It is one of the only seven copies in the country.

Wearing glasses, Sun reads for more than three hours every day. Now he has finished reading most of his collections. Speaking of her father, Sun Ziyu, said, “My father has a habit of making notes on each book. He makes a mark whenever he stops reading so that he can carry on reading from where he left off.”

Village official Liu Jiao said, “Many children in the village love to visit Sun and listen to his stories.” She said the elderly man has earned respect from the whole village. People call him “Teacher Sun” and children call him “great-grandfather”.

Sun Ziyu said her father also writes poems and prose(散文) in his spare time and enjoys reading his works to the family. She said under her father’s influence, family members take the time to read together and exchange views. “That’s their favorite part,” she said.

“My father has loved reading for a lifetime,” Sun Ziyu said. “Reading is his meat and drink.”

9 . Myrtle is a small sleepy town in Missouri. There’s no bank or restaurant here, but a small stone_______right next to the state highway. Half of it is a post office. The other half is a one-room_______.Rachel Luster took over this library four months ago with the_______of connecting the community to the outside world and creating a _______center for the kids.

Her first task was_______the books she felt every library must have: The Odyssey. “I looked and looked. But we didn’t have. No library in our system had one,” Luster said. So she started to use social media to_______money from people around the state and has already _______about 1, 000 new books to the library.

“While the Myrtle library_______taxpayer money, it gets only $200a month for books and supplies,” she explained. “But the library is a _______for the community because many people here do not have ________to the Internet at home and the library is the only place that people can connect to the outside world. I want to bring a sense of ________to the community.”

Luster’s library is open only three days a week. One of her ________visitors is 10-year-old Blake Brooks.

“Before________this library, my favorite activity was watching TV,” he said. “Now, as soon as I step off the school bus, I come here to________.I like to________.I’m in the books I read.”

10 . When it comes to reading, we may be assuming that reading for knowledge is the best reason to pick up a book. Research, however, suggests that reading fiction may provide far more important benefits than nonfiction. It may be one of the best methods for building empathy (同理心), critical thinking and creativity.

High-level business leaders have long enthusiastically praised the virtues of reading. But they almost always recommend nonfiction. Reading nonfiction might certainly be valuable for collecting knowledge. However, research suggests that reading fiction predicts a sharper ability to understand other people’s motivations.

In addition, research suggests that reading literary fiction is an effective way to improve the brain’s ability to keep an open mind while processing information, a necessary skill for effective decision-making. In a 2013 study, researchers examined something called the need for cognitive closure (认知闭合), or the desire to “reach a quick conclusion in decision-making and an aversion to uncertainty and confusion”. Individuals with a strong need for cognitive closure rely heavily on “early information hints”, meaning they struggle to change their minds as new information becomes available. A high need for cognitive closure also means individuals are attracted to smaller bits of information and fewer viewpoints. Individuals who resist the need for cognitive closure tend to be more thoughtful, more creative, and more comfortable with competing narratives — all characteristics of high emotional intelligence.

University of Toronto researchers discovered that individuals in their study who read short stories (as opposed to essays) demonstrated a lower need for cognitive closure. That result is not surprising given that reading literature requires us to slow down, take in volumes of information, and then change our minds as we read. There’s no easy answer in literature. Instead, there’s only perspective-taking. As readers, we’ll almost certainly find Lolita’s narrator Humbert Humbert hateful, but we are forced to experience how he thinks, a valuable exercise for decreasing our need for cognitive closure.