Growing up, Mychal Threets fell in love with reading at Fairfield Civic Center Library (FCCL) in California. Now, at age 33, he is the supervising librarian of FCCL and has gained a _________ of more than 650,000 people who _________ watching the videos he posts about libraries on social media.

Threets was mostly home schooled by his mother. They spent hours at FCCL each day, so it became a _________ to him, he said. But he didn’t see many people who looked like him employed there and didn’t consider _________ a librarian until age 23, when he was hired to shelve _________ at a different Fairfield library. That’s when “my librarian _________ began,” he said. Threets took librarian education courses and worked his way up to the _________ he now holds.

About two years ago, he began _________ what he calls his “library joy” on TikTok and Instagram. He posts videos about being a librarian as well as _________ on using a library card, book recommendations, and stories about children who have discovered their love of __________ at the library.

Although the attention he receives for his posts can feel __________ at times, Threets is mostly encouraged that he has been accomplishing his goal. “I ought to __________ people how cool libraries are and how much library workers __________ their communities,” he said.

The __________ he has for young people is to remember to visit their own local library. When life gets tough, Threets said, you can always find a __________ in there.

For many people today, reading is no longer relaxation. To keep up their work they must read letters, reports, trade publications, interoffice communications, not to mention newspapers and magazines; a never-ending flood of words. In getting a job advancing, the ability to read and comprehend ____ can mean the difference between success and failure. Yet the unfortunate fact is that most of us are ____ readers. Most of us develop poor reading habits at an early age, and never ____ them. The main shortage lies in the actual stuff of language itself – words. Taken individually, words have little____ until they are combined together into phrases, sentences and paragraphs. Unfortunately, ____, the untrained reader does not read groups of words. He read one word at a time with difficulty, often regressing to ____ words or passages. Regression, namely, the tendency to look back over what you have just read, is a common ____ habit in reading. Another bad habit which ____ the speed of reading is vocalization –sounding each word either ____ or mentally as one reads.

To overcome these bad habits, some reading clinics use a device called an accelerator, which moves a bar (or curtain) down the page at a predetermined speed. The bar is set a slightly ____ rate than the reader finds comfortable, in order to “____” him. The accelerator forces the reader to read fast, making word-by-word reading, regression and sub-vocalization, practically ____. At first comprehension is ____ speed. But when you learn to read ideas and concepts, you will not only read faster, but your comprehension will improve. Many people have found their reading skill ____ improved after some training. Take Charles Au, a business manager, for instance, his reading rate was a reasonably good 172 words a minute before the training, now it is an excellent 1,378 words a minute. He is delighted that now he can go through a lot more reading material in a(n) ____ period of time.

One day when I was 12, my mother gave me an order: I was to 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—inability to ______. In the library, I found my way into the “Children’s Room.” I sat down on the floor and pulled a few books off the ______ at random. The cover of a book _____ my eye. It ______ a picture of a beagle(小猎兔狗). I had recently had a beagle, the first and only animal companion I ever had as a child. He was my secret sharer, but 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 ran my fingers ______ the picture of the dog on the cover. My eyes ran across the title, Amos, the Beagle with a Plan. ______, I had read the title. Without opening the book, I borrowed it from the library for the summer.

Under the shade of a bush, I started to read about Amos. I read very, very slowly with difficulty. ______ pages were turned slowly, I got the main idea of the story about a dog who, like mine, had been ______ from his family and who finally found his way back home. That dog was my dog, and I was the little boy in the book. At the end of the story, my mind continued the final _____ of reunion, on and on, until my own lost dog and I were, in my mind, running together. My mother’s call returned me to the ______ world. Something ______ me: I had read a book, and I had loved reading that book. Everyone knew I could not read. But I had read it. Books could be incredibly _____ and I was going to read them. I never told my mother about my “miraculous” (奇迹般的) ______ that summer, but she saw a slow but remarkable ______ in my classroom performance during the next year. And years later, she was ______ that her son had read thousands of books, was ______ a PhD in literature, and authored his own books, articles, poetry and fiction. The power of the ______ has held.