1 . I was thrilled when I was pregnant. However, I quickly ______ that the hardest part of pregnancy wasn’t tiredness or swelling but, for me, listening to person after person tell me once the baby was born, I would never read a book again, which ______ me greatly.

I’m a writer and more of a reader. Books are the ______ of my life. There are many things I can ______ give up for the ______ of motherhood, but reading isn’t one of them.

My husband ______ me, “It’s OK to do whatever you want to do. Those who quit reading after they had kids never made reading a top ______ .” Indeed, he was right.

My newborn wouldn’t sleep unless she was held. But there was a great ______ in rocking a baby who’s nursing or napping in your arms: lots of time to______ . My e-reader then became my best friend as I could hold it with one hand and download library books when I was ______ in the house. I read over 100 books in my daughter’s first year and I ______ reading with getting me through those difficult early months.

Now we’re through the unstable and unrest preschool years, and she often said, “Mama, please read me a story. It’s the only way I can ______ . ” As a mother, I’m amazed how ______ she is to know so early how to care for herself.

Should my daughter one day ______ to have a child herself, I won’t tell her that she’ll never read again. ______ I’ll remind her that people do what they want to do, and good moms take care of themselves.

3 . A second-grade education has not stopped rubbish collector Jose Gutierrez. He is bringing the gift of reading to thousands of Colombian children.

Back 27 years ago, Gutierrez set out to save books from the _________, driving a rubbish truck through the country’s richer neighborhoods. Now the ground floor of his small house is a community library.

Books are _________ for children in low income neighborhoods with up-to-date reading _________ at bookstores too costly. In Bogota with a population of 8.5 million, the public _________ amount to just 17 altogether, all located faraway from poorer areas.

Influenced by his mother, Gutierrez himself has had a（n）_________ for reading. So far, he has gathered over 25,000 books, including the book Gutierrez initially _________, a copy of the _________ novel Anna Karenina that was later _________ by The Little Prince and other famous ones.

Now, Gutierrez still _________ the rubbish for additions. His __________ as Colombia’s “Lord of the Books” has won him thousands of donated books, many of them posted to 24 other libraries alike across the country. Moreover, Gutierrez has traveled to book __________ in Mexico and Chile to share his experience of starting a library with the __________ books.

Gutierrez says though he doesn’t __________ technology allowing books to be read digitally, he prefers to read the __________ words on paper, saying “There is nothing more __________ than having a book in your pocket, in your bag or inside your car.”

4 . Both of my parents were full-time workers when I was a child. I was always locked indoors so that they could go to work without ________ about me. I didn’t have any ________, either. So for a long period of time, I would sit beside the small window and look unhappily at the outside ________.

One day, when I was walking towards the ________ as usual and wondering whether I could do something unusual to ________ time, I tripped over by a chair and fell down with my hands ________ on a floorboard. When I tried to rise, I ________ a hole under the floorboard and there was something in it. I ________ my hand in and took it out. It was old and small: Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. ________ I was bored, I decided to see what was inside this little book.

Mr. Bartlett had ________ quotations from thousands of people. It was the first time that I had seen people’s various kinds of ________: happiness, sorrow, surprise, loneliness and fear. To ________ them, I read the book again and again. Then I realized that I might be ________ because I had no one to talk and share with, and nothing to play with ________.

Later on, I read more and more books and understood more feelings and I always kept the book with me-it opened a ________ world for me and with it I began a journey of     16    .

6 . 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.”

8 . 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.

9 . To beat the blues of staying at home all day, I _______ an ‘online book exchange’ on account of my friends. Details were _______ to understand, and I spent hours trying to make it clear.

I had my doubts, though. For one, it involved _______ a copy of your favorite book to a complete stranger, and then waiting for a series of people to _______ the chain, till you received some books _______, from complete strangers. A natural pessimist I am, I _______ if I would receive any books. But _______, I sent a copy of my favorite, Jeffrey Arche’s The Eleventh Commandment, to a stranger. Days later, I was _______ when the first book arrived! And soon followed another 10 books that I had never in my wildest dreams imagined I would receive. Over the next two weeks, books kept _______, ranging from Dr Abdul Kalam’s autobiography (自传) to Charlotte Jane Eyre and a bestselling Japanese thriller. I even ________ my afternoon nap (午觉), ready to open the door ________ another book was delivered.

There is something intimate (亲密的) about exchanging books with strangers. By ________ a book with someone, I believe we end up sharing a part of our soul with them.

The posting about the book exchange on social media brought me ________ to many old friends, with whom I had lost touch due to the ________ schedules we all had before COVID-19 ________ our plans. It fired long discussions about trying out wine in Vietnam.