1 . An ordinary day in 2008, first grade teacher Alvin Irby stopped by a Bronx barbershop after school for a haircut. Before long, one of his students came in.

“He is getting antsy; he’s kind of looking bored,” Irby recalled. “I’m looking at this student (thinking), ‘He should be practicing his reading.’ But I didn’t have a book.” That moment stayed with Irby, and five years later he started Barbershop Books. Since 2013, the nonprofit has brought more than 50,000 free children’s books to more than 200 barbershops in mainly Black neighborhoods across the country.

According to Irby, they are putting books in a male-centered space. “Less than 2% of teachers are Black males and many Black boys are raised by single moms. Black boys don’t see Black men reading.” So, Irby involves the barbers in his mission—training them to engage boys about reading.

“We want them to encourage kids to use the reading spaces,” he said. “Then they can talk to them about how they like reading, how funny a book was, or tell them about another book another kid was reading.” Irby believes that talking about books with a Black man can be powerful for the boys he serves. “Our goal is not to turn barbers into tutors,” he said. “This is an opportunity to provide boys with male role models.”

Denny Moe was the first barber to work with Irby. Moe had previously offered video games at his Harlem shop, to bring in extra income, but he was willing to forego that to help the community. “I decided to pay it forward by getting rid of the video games, putting books in here, just to get the kids’ minds going,” he said. “You want to make an impact.”

And that’s what keeps Irby motivated. “I’m just excited that we get to create a safe space for boys to do something that’s really life changing,” he said. “That’s what I really believe reading is. It unlocks potential.”

4 . TikTok is making a mark on the world of publishing. Much of this is done through BookTok, the app’s community of users who comment on books. It is among the largest communities on the app; videos with this tag have been viewed 179 billion times, more than twice as many as BeautyTok. Whoever said books are dead has not spent much time on TikTok, nor in bookstores, which now have whole displays promoting titles “as seen on TikTok”.

Last year in Britain one in four book buyers used TikTok. Although the sales share is still very small, TikTok’s influence is significant and growing. The largest group of book buyers—women aged 54 and younger—are more likely to use the app than their male peers. TikTok recommendations influence their purchases, creating new literary stars and unearthing unlikely past ones, too.

One way to think about BookTok is as a book club for the Internet age. Just as stars like Oprah Winfrey and Barack Obama can cause copies to fly off bookstore shelves by updating their lists of recommended reads, BookTok does something similar. However, the tastemakers are not usually celebrities (名人) but attractive book girlies doing reading challenges, often in artfully lit bedrooms.

Some old-fashioned bibliophiles (藏书家) may suspect that BookTok is less about books than about people seeking attention by promoting them. But BookTokers are already swaying bestseller lists. For example, novels categorised as “romance” have enjoyed the biggest push due to the promotion of BookTok. In addition, because TikTok is so visual, the app has an outsize impact on sales of physical books in particular. E-books do not make such attractive visual props. BookTokers show off their notes and flick through pages. Filming themselves finishing a book in a single day against a backdrop of hundreds of them on shelves is all part of the performance, and viewers will be extra impressed if the book looks thick.

6 . BOOKS THAT CHANGED MY LIFE

Susie Dent is Britain’s most-loved word expert. She has two new books: Interesting Stories About Curious Words (John Murray) and Roots of Happiness (Puffin), both available now.

Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain Fournier

This was the first book that really stopped me in my tracks. I lapped up its romantic but melancholy (忧郁的) story of the dreamy world between childhood and adolescence. I’ve never found as acute a description of longing as I did here, and for many things: for the mysterious castle, for love, and for freedom. It is an mysterious and dreamy book. What adds to the magic is that this was the only story that Fournier wrote—he died on the front line in the early months of the First World War.

The Oxford English Dictionary

If I could take just one book to a desert island it would (of course) be the complete Oxford English Dictionary —all 20 volumes. It may sound predictable, but the OED is anything but. In its pages you’ll find comedy, passion, tragedy, and thousands of hidden stories. Even the simplest of words have had quite a journey— “nice”, for example, has gone from meaning “stupid” to “pleasant”. Add to that a host of words that have unaccountably disappeared when—to my mind—we could really do with them, and you have entertainment forever. And which of us hasn’t met an “ultracrepidarian”: one who loves to talk about something they know nothing about?

Maus and Maus II by Art Spiegelman

The graphic novels Maus and Maus Ⅱ by the American cartoonist Art Spiegelman are not easy reads, but they’re important ones. They’re really a tale within a tale, in which the narrator (叙述者) interviews his father about his experiences of the Holocaust and his liberation from a concentration camp. Here the Nazis are drawn as cats, and Jews are mice. Overarching it all is an unforgettable tale of a son’s relationship with his broken father. Given that German has always been my first love, it felt necessary to read these books. Spiegelman takes the unspeakable and gives it an immediacy I’ll never forget.