2 . It's often said that you can judge a person by looking at what's on their bookshelves. Well, when I asked myself this question a few years ago, I made a(n) _______ discovery. Pretty much all the _______ on my bookshelves were written by British authors, and there was almost nothing in translation from other _______. What a shame! So, I decided to begin my _____________ reading project.

But how could I find books from much of the rest of the world? I had to ask for _______. So in October 2011, I started my blog, and I _______ a short appeal (呼吁) online. Within hours, people began to _______. At first, it was friends and colleagues. Then it was friends of friends. And soon, it was _______.

Four days later, I got a(n) _______ from a woman called Rafidah in Kuala Lumpur. She said she loved my project, ________ if she could go to her local English-language bookshop and choose my Malaysian book and post it to me. I ________ accepted, and a few weeks later, a package ________ containing nothing but two books — Rafidah's choice from Malaysia, and a book from Singapore that she had also ________ for me. At the time, I was ________ that a stranger more than 6,000 miles away would go to such lengths to help someone she would probably never ________.

But Rafidah's kindness ________ to be the pattern for that year. Time and again, people went out of their ________ to help me. And books often came from ________ sources. A writer even emailed me an unpublished translation of his novel to me, allowing me to become one of the ________ people ever to read that book in English.

That year, thanks to kind strangers from the four ________ of the world. I read books from over 100 countries.

3 . One day when I was 12, my mother gave me an order: walk to the public library, and borrow at least one book for the summer. This was one more weapon for her to ___my strange problem—____to read.

In the library, I sat down on the floor and ___a few books off the shelf ____. The cover of a book caught my eye. It ___a picture of a beagle. I had recently had a beagle, the first and only animal ___I ever had as a child. ___, one morning, he was gone, ___to someone who had the space and the money to care for him. I never forgot my beagle.

There on the book’s cover was a beagle which looked ___to my dog. I ___my fingers over the picture of the dog on the cover. My eyes ran across the title, Amos, the Beagle with a Plan. ____, I read the title. Without opening the book, I borrowed it.

I started to read about Amos very slowly with ____. Though pages were ___slowly, I got the main idea of the story. At the end of the story, the final scene of ___lingered on my mind until my own lost dog and I were running together.

My mother’s call ___me to the real world. I never told her about my “ ____” experience, but she saw a slow, yet remarkable ___in my school performance. Years later, she was ___that her son had read thousands of books, was awarded a PhD in literature, and authored his own books, articles, poetry and fiction. Books could be ___wonderful and the ___of the words has held.