Not long ago, Linda Khan was sitting by a hospital bed in Houston, feeling ill at ease. Beside her lay her 88-year-old father, who needed surgery.

What troubled her almost as much as his health was the fact that all day the two of them had engaged in nothing but depressing small talk. She and her father had always had good conversations, but now his once wide-ranging interests seemed to have shrunk to the size of the room. He talked about the terrible hospital food, the tests, the doctors, the diagnosis, the potential outcomes. “It is really hard to sit with a person in a hospital,” Khan says. “It feels like there’s nothing to talk about except their medical situation.”

That day in the hospital, her eye fell on a pile of books that people had brought as gifts. Her father had always been a reader, but lately he didn’t have the energy or focus. She picked up Young Titan, Michael Shelden’s biography of Winston Churchill, and started to read it out loud. “Right away it changed the mood and atmosphere,” she says. That afternoon, Khan read to her father for an hour. It was a relief and a pleasure for both of them. Reading gave the daughter a way to connect with her father and help him in a situation that was otherwise out of her hands. Listening allowed the father to travel on the sound of his daughter’s voice, and back into the realm of mature, intellectual engagement, where he felt himself again.

“He’s in and out of the hospital a lot now,” Khan says, “and I always read to him. ”That may be just what the doctor ordered. In a 2010 survey in the United Kingdom, elderly adults who joined weekly read-aloud groups reported better concentration, less anxiety, and an improved ability to socialize. The survey authors believed these improvements were in large part due to the “rich, varied, nonprescriptive diet of serious literature” that group members consumed, with fiction encouraging feelings of relaxation and calm, poetry promoting focused concentration, and narratives of all sorts giving rise to thoughts, feelings, and memories.

Sweden and its Nordic neighbors have some of the highest literacy rates (识字率) in the world. The Swedes view equal access to knowledge as important to an individual’s future success. This is true regardless of economic background and, clearly, geographic location.

Sweden has a floating library — the bokbaten — that brings thousands of books to people on dozens of remote islands in the Stockholm archipelago twice a year. Every spring and fall since 1953, the Stockholm Library Service rents a boat for a week, loads it with books, and charts a course for about 23 inhabited (有人居住的) islands.

When the boat pulls in, people climb aboard to return books they borrowed during the last visit and check out the library’s newest offerings. The boat carries about 3,000 books, and people can put in requests ahead of time. The three or four volunteer librarians who take turns working on the ship say that, as you might expect, the latest best-sellers are in high demand. There are picture books for children, popular thrillers, texts about history and science, cookbooks, and audiobooks, etc.

In addition to a library boat, Sweden also has library buses that bring books to people in rural communities. They also develop temporary (临时的) libraries in places such as stores and social gathering spots. The boat starts as a service for fishermen and island workers but expands to serve people who prefer to read hard copies of books over e-books or audiobooks. Since island people can order copies in advance, boxes of books are piled up in the boat waiting to be delivered.

The book boat is of great positive value for children and adults because they can in this way take part in the modern public library. The book boat has an important function as good public relations for the library^’s services and has the effect of promoting reading not only in the archipelago but elsewhere.

Even in a nation of book lovers, the future of the floating library remains uncertain. If the Regional Library cuts funding for the boat, the bokbaten will be no more.

Have you ever had one of those days when all you wanted to do was read an emotionally powerful story that would cause you to tears? Most of us tend to be attracted by stories that reach us on multiple levels, including sadness. There are plenty of books that make you cry (and sometimes laugh) and that you can really sink your teeth into. Here are four of them.

This realistic and moving description of life in Afghanistan accounts for the people who were badly affected by the Taliban. You’ll cry as you get to know the familial relationships and cruelty involved, but you’ll also get a sense of hope as you quickly read through this appealing novel.

Let’s put it this way: Death itself is the narrator. The story is about a young girl named Liesel who has to live with foster parents during World War II. On the way to her new home, her brother dies, setting the gloomy tone for the story. There is hope, however, when Liesel discovers her love for reading and makes a relationship with a young Jewish man she helps hide from the Nazis.

This is probably the most likely book on the list to make you cry, as it records the experiences of teens who are dying from cancer and living their last days in love. Their lifestyle is tragic and disturbing at the same time, as we watch their health worsen. The real tragedy is the love story between the main characters, who know that their romance is fruitless.

Easily one of the saddest stories of abuse in recent decades, A Child Called It is based on the true story of Dave Pelzer, a boy from California who suffered at the hands of his cruel family. The tears will come from both sadness and the inspiration tied to Dave’s fight for survival in an environment where he is believed worthless.