3 . Fu Lei’s Family Letters is a book of letters written by Chinese translator and writer Fu Lei to his elder son Fu Cong, who is a famous pianist. Between 1954 and 1966, Fu Cong spent a lot of time away from home training as a piano player. As a result, writing letters became Fu Lei’s usual way of communicating with his elder son. Fu Min, Fu Lei’s younger son edited the letters and the book came out in 1981.

The book shows Fu Lei’s family tradition and value. To Fu Lei, the purpose of education of a person, is to make that person useful to the society. Fu Lei praised his son Fu Cong after winning a piano competition. Fu Lei wrote, “We are happy because you make your country proud. I am so excited when I think about your future. You will make great progress and serve more people, encourage them and heal them.”

In the family letters, Fu Cong was also advised to read famous Chinese texts. When reading these books, Fu Cong was told to connect ideas and feelings together, for that would help him become a better person. To Fu Lei, learning to be a good person comes before any academic training.

Fu Lei’s Family Letters has a great impact on people in China because it helps many young students understand how they should live their lives. The following contents are teenagers’ favorite:

“We won’t get hurt so long as our moods stay stable.”

“The degree of success is not completely under our control. It’s half through personal efforts and half through destiny. But so long as you stay tough, you can weather failures, blunders and heavy blows — whether such blows stem from interpersonal, livelihood-related, technical or academic matters.

“A person needs to have the courage to confront reality and past mistakes. As such, he can come up with sensible analysis and in-depth appreciation. Only then he won’t be weighed down by bad memories.

Yours,

Li Hua

6 . Best Short Story Collections Everyone Should Read

If you are looking for great storytelling but don’t want to choose a long novel, then short story collections are the answer. Here we have gathered four of the best short stories and collections, from all sorts of backgrounds, to meet your need.

Runaway by Alice Munro

This award-winning collection features eight stories by the Canadian author Alice Munro. She tells stories of women and their relationships—with strong themes of love, friendship, and motherhood, among others. The idea of running away is another theme found in these stories.

The Complete Stories by Flannery O’Connor

Published in 1972, The Complete Stories actually won the National Book Award that same year. This collection includes 31 stories and they are told from the perspective of characters from the American South, as they deal with social issues like gender roles, and more.

The Refugees(难民)by Viet Thanh Nguyen

From Thanh Nguyen comes this Pulitzer Prize winning collection of seven short stories that are all about Vietnamese refugees who have moved to the US. However, instead of describing the difficulties of their trips, Nguyen focuses on the lives they’ve established in their new country. Each story shows a unique immigrant(移民的)experience as characters move between cultures and countries.

Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

This classic short story is about the journals of Charlie Gordon, a cleaner with an IQ of 68．Charlie’s luck changes when he is selected for an experiment that is intended to turn him into a genius. However, everything that goes up must come down in the end. Flowers for Algernon won the Hugo Award in 1960 for its creative presentation.

7 . Here are some of the best nonfiction books of recent years.

Somebody’s Daughter

$ 16 at Amazon

Ashley C. Ford talks about growing up as a black girl in Indiana, dealing with poverty, the complexities of adolescence, and a tense relationship with her mother. She often wished that she could express her feelings with her father, but failed for reasons she didn’t know. Until one day — after going through a heart-broken experience with a boy, which she kept from her family — her grandmother told her. And what she learned turned her entire world upside down.

Crazy Stories About Racism

$ 14 at Amazon

New York-based comedian Amber Ruffin, along with her sister Lacey Lamar, shares their everyday experiences about their bad conditions. It gets especially bad for Lacey who still lives in their home state of Nebraska, and is a start for these ridiculous but all-too-real encounters (遭遇).

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

$ 25 at Amazon

If you want to get in touch with your creative side, this book might just be the trick. As the title suggests, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is a literary master class that takes readers into the mind of Booker Prize-winning author George Saunders. He discusses what makes great stories, how they work, and what they say about ourselves and today’s world.

All In

$ 21 at Amazon

Sports legend Billie Jean King writes a self-portrait that talks about the highs and lows of her amazing tennis career, her work in activism, and the ongoing fight for social justice and equality.

8 . Technology seems to discourage slow, immersive reading. Reading on a screen tires your eyes and makes it harder for you to keep your place. Online writing tends to be more skimmable and list-like than print. The cognitive neuroscientist Mary Walt argued recently that this “new norm” of skim reading is producing “an invisible, game -changing transformation” in how readers process words. The neuronal circuit that sustains the brain’s capacity to read now favors the rapid absorption of information.

We shouldn’t overplay this danger. All readers skim. From about the age of nine, our eyes start to bounce around the page, reading only about a quarter of the words properly, and filling in the gaps by inference. Nor is there anything new in these fears about declining attention spans. So far, the anxieties have proved to be false alarms. “Quite a few critics have been worried about attention spans lately and see very short stories as signs of cultural decline,” the American author Selvin Brown wrote. “No one ever said that poems were evidence of short attention spans.”

And yet the Internet has certainly changed the way we read. For a start, it means that there is more to read, because more people than ever are writing. And digital writing is meant for rapid release and response. This mode of writing and reading can be interactive and fun. But often it treats other people’s words as something to be quickly harvested as fodder (素材) to say something else. Everyone talks over the top of everyone else, desperate to be heard.

Perhaps we should slow down. Reading is constantly promoted as a social good and source of personal achievement. But this advocacy often emphasizes “enthusiastic” “passionate” or “eager” reading, none of which adjectives suggest slow, quiet absorption. To a slow reader, a piece of writing can only be fully understood by immersing oneself in the words and their slow comprehension of a line of thought.

The human need for this kind of deep reading is too tenacious for any new technology to destroy. We often assume that technological change can’t be stopped and happens in one direction, so that older media like “dead-tree” books are kicked out by newer, more virtual forms. In practice, older technologies can coexist with new ones. The Kindle has not killed off the printed book any more than the car killed off the bicycle. We still want to enjoy slowly. formed ideas and carefully-chosen words. Even in a fast-moving age, there is time for slow reading.

One important feature of classic literature is that it often     1     (reflect) an author’s own experiences and can therefore help us understand the important issues of his or her time. This is one reason     2     the best works of literature still appeal to readers long after they     3     (write). Cao Xueqin’s A Dream of Red Mansions, one of the most     4     (significance) novels in Chinese literature, is a good example of this. Its storyline follows the fall of a large wealthy family much like the author’s own. No doubt     5     (draw) on his own experiences, Cao Xueqin gives a detailed description of     6     life was like at that time. The novel contains a great number of     7     (detail) such as what the upper class wore and ate. It also describes the social relation in 18th-century China. As a result, readers are capable     8     better understanding the gap between the rich and poor, men and women, the     9     (learn) and the uneducated in the historical context. Cultural and historical elements like these make A Dream of Red Mansions a timeless classic.    10    (general) speaking, we can learn much about a specific period in history from classic literature.