8 . Booklist is a book-review magazine that has been published by the American Library Association for more than 100 years and is widely viewed as offering the most reliable reviews to help libraries decide what to buy and to help library patrons and students decide what to read, view, or listen to.

All the Lonely People. By Mike Gayle. 2021. Grand Central.

Eighty-two-year-old Hubert Bird is a Jamaican immigrant who has called Great Britain home for almost 60 years. To save his daughter from worry, he has created a fictional social life, but when she schedules a visit, he must rustle up some actual friends in this heartwarming story.

Last Chance Texaco. By Rickie Lee Jones. 2021. Grove.

Grammy-winning Rickie Lee Jones explains that her life has not been as polished as her music as she describes her rootless childhood as the granddaughter of vaudeville performers, struggles as a teenage runaway, battles with drugs, and devotion to creativity.

One Italian Summer. By Rebecca Serle. Read by Laurer Graham. 2022. 6.5 hr. Simon & Schuster Audio.

Graham’s pleasant voice immediately draws listeners into this time-travel novel in which a sorrowful daughter meet her recently late mother, in Italy, as she was many years ago.

A Retrospective. By Charles White. Ed. by Sarah Kelly Oehler and Esther Adler. 2018. Yale.

Charles White (1918-79), was fascinated by the illustrated books he read as a child at the Chicago Public Library and quickly demonstrated his own phenomenal artistic talent, ultimately creating unique and arresting portraits, monumental and masterful drawings that profoundly engage with Black history and the realities of African American life.

9 . Reading doesn’t come naturally to people, but most of us have learned how. Eighty-six percent of the world’s population is literate(有读写能力的)，and this rate has been increasing for centuries. Literacy makes it possible to navigate a world filled with books, websites, text messages, road signs and more.

Could a growing number of people participate in today’s world without reading or writing at all? Technology makes it possible. Most of our devices now talk to us and take spoken commands. Smart cars ask for a destination and then give directions.Smart virtual assistants listen for requests to report the weather, play a song, set a timer, order groceries, and much more. Software can also read text aloud or turn speech into text. These interactions aren’t perfect-the software still makes silly mistakes. But it’s getting better and better. It’s possible to imagine a future world where all of our communication with our devices and each other is spoken.

But reading and writing are powerful tools.For one, most people read faster than they speak. A podcaster or audio book narrator speaks at around150to 160 words per minute, while a strong reader can cruise through a text at 300 to 400 words per minute. That’s twice as fast! Research has also found that people remember more information and stay more interested when they read as opposed to listen. Learning to read also creates new connections in the brain. In her book Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, Maryanne Wolf writes that with the invention of reading, human beings “rearranged the very organization of our brain, which in turn expanded the ways we were able to think, which changed the intellectual evolution of our species.” Would we really choose to give up that progress?What do you think? Do you hope people keep on reading and writing, or will technology make literacy obsolete(淘汰的)?