When I was a child, there wasn't much for me to read. It was not until junior high school that I began to ______ traditional Chinese classical novels. And books from other countries became ______ to me after I had been admitted into the university.

The first English novel that I read was Jane Eyre. Though ______ for a first-year student at university, I spent hours and hours ______ the meaning of every word and sentence. It took me almost half a year to ______ the book. With Jane Eyre ______ my heart and soul, I was even more ______ in the rich world of literature. I developed a ______ for reading Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, W. S. Maugham, D. H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway…The ______ goes on and on. Reading is what I cannot live without.

What can one ______ from reading? It can be said that serious reading makes one a ______ person. When we read serious books, we must ______ our minds so as to find some room for new ideas, knowledge, and inspirations. Reading helps us overcome the ______ of knowledge and our prejudice（偏见）by offering different insights. We may learn to develop an overall view of the ______ , either inside or outside.

Serious reading is time-consuming and thus makes us more ______ . If we want to finish hundreds of pages of War and Peace, we must be prepared for a long journey without taking any ______ .

Well-designed classical novels make us more ______ . The writers put their hearts and minds into ______ plots, presenting descriptions, and expressing their values. To ______ the stories, we must make full use of our born logical（逻辑上的）competence, which might ______ reasonability.

Many thanks to Blanche Caffiere, my elementary school teacher. She deserves big credit for helping me become the man I am today.

When I first met Mrs. Caffiere, I was a pretty shy fourth grader. I felt _________ by my terrible handwriting and messy desk. I was _________ trying to go unnoticed by others and hide the fact that I liked to _________ — something that most boys disliked at that time. But Mrs. Caffiere helped make it okay for me to be myself — a _________ and nerdy (书呆子气) boy and she taught me that my love of reading was a strength.

She pulled me out of my shell by sharing her _________ for different books. When I was at sixth grade, one day, she noticed that I was reading a Tom Swift Jr. book and _________ that I could handle more _________ literature. She _________ me with more challenging texts and took the time to discuss them with me, “Did you like it?” She would ask. “Why? What did you learn?” She _________ listened to what I had to say. __________ those conversations we became good friends. Meanwhile, she __________ me to biographies of famous people throughout history.

As we were in primary school, teachers generally didn’t want to __________ their young students with extra reading assignments. However, I learned from Mrs. Caffiere that my teachers were happy to share their __________, and I just needed to ask what I wondered about the world. I would often __________ my teachers about the books they liked, read those books, and offer my __________. Gradually, I become a life-long learner who thinks reading is absolutely __________ to success, and I read a lot — almost one book per week, fifty books a year.

When I look back on it now, there is no __________ that my time with Mrs. Caffiere helped __________ my interest in books. Not only did she have a __________ impact on me, but she played a remarkable role in shaping the life of a child.

Mrs. Cafiere, you should get the __________ for your empathy and guidance to make me what I am today.

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.