When it was announced that Patrick Modiano had won the Nobel Prize in Literature on Oct.9, the Swedish Academy had not yet managed to reach the writer himself to tell him the news. as the Telegraph put it, “It was a curious case of missing personhood in an author whose career had been spent in searching others, within the confines (界限) of a single city.”

    Though the 69-year-old French author has had a successful writing career, only six of his books have been translated into English. One reason for this might be that “Modiano's storylines are as slim as the books themselves”, said the BBC.

    While most of Modiano's works don't run for hundreds of pages, they explore serious subjects. The author's signature themes are Germany's occupation during World War II and the evolution of Paris over the past century.

    Modiano's life has been greatly affected by Nazi Germany's occupation during the war, and his family's connections to it. According to New York-based newspaper Forward, his father survived the war dishonorably. When Paris's Jews were rounded up for deportation(驱逐)to concentration camps, the businessman did not join them but spent the time making money from deals with Nazis on the black market.

    “The novelist has a duty to record the traces of the people who were made to disappear,” French writer Clemence Boulouque, also an expert in Jewish Studies, told The New York magazine.

    In his more than three dozen novels, Modiano has returned again and to the same themes: Jewishness, the Nazi occupation, and loss of identity.

    Paris is another recurring(重复的)theme in Modiano's works .Most of his novels are set in the city , from the rich parts of downtown Paris to more remote suburbs where the characters try to live anonymous protect lives.

    Anne Ghisoli, the director of  Librairie Gallimard, a bookstore in Paris, concluded, “Modiano is a master of writing on memory and occupation, which haunt(萦绕)and inform his works. He is a chronicler(年代记录者)of  Paris ,its streets, and its present.”

    How much television do you watch? Did you really give an honest answer? A recent study shows that people aren't totally truthful about their television-watching habits.

    The study in question was conducted at Ball State University in the US. Researchers there wanted to find out how much television people view according to their age. The study was paid for by a council associated with the Nielsen Company, which determines television ratings. The conclusions were that people spend more than 8 hours a day looking at a screen. This included cell phones and computers，but the majority were television screens.

    There are three interesting things about this study. The first is that people are exposed to more than one hour of advertisements per day. The second is that even with access to DVDs and internet videos, television is still the most popular media source. The third is that the amount of screen-watching people do is relatively the same from the ages of 18-65.

    So, if everyone is watching television, why lie about it? Well, if someone admits they watch television for five or six hours, they could be considered a couch potato. Michael Phillips, one of the study's main researchers, says, “There's a social stigma for people who watch too much television. Sometimes, however, watching the latest reality show or the funniest sitcom gives co-workers and friends fun things to talk about.”

    Even if you do watch a lot of television, perhaps we can use this study as a reason to be honest with ourselves about how much time we spend in front of the television. I mean, after all, everyone else is doing it...

    I will absolutely be the first person to romanticize libraries. I come from a home with thirty-two bookcases, a count that does not include the several dozen boxes of books in the attic labeled "work" and "extra." All these books are courtesy of my parents, both of whom were English majors in their day and in whose footsteps I never hesitated to follow. My childhood dream was of a house with a claw-foot bathtub, stained glass, and (most importantly) an enormous library made of built-in shelves, a sliding ladder, and window seats in every window. As a high school girl, I began working at the county library near my house, following up on two summers of volunteering with their summer reading program. I was all starry eyes and romantic visions of alphabetizing the classics and discovering gems among the new arrivals. What I found instead was that the life of a library was nothing like my daydreams, but far more important than I could have imagined.

    There is no library that is only a library anymore. Modern libraries can't afford and don't try to be only a receptacle for free books. They offer classes, book groups, Internet access, resume and tax help, tutoring, and multimedia resources for anyone who might wander in. Librarians are equipped to help with research and give recommendations. Most libraries have access to interlibrary loans, making the acquisition of nearly any piece of material merely a matter of time. What makes libraries so unique and important, however, is none of the diversity of resources and opportunities for community that they most certainly provide.

    ____________________________________. Every building one enters today comes with some expectation of spending money. Restaurants require paying for service. Shops require the intention of purchasing something. Houses require rent. Anyone who has lived near the poverty line, whether or not they have actually been homeless, has felt the threatening pressure toward expenditure that permeates the public spaces of modern Western culture. Even a free restroom is becoming difficult to find, especially as growing cities experience ever-increasing space restrictions.

    In a library, no one is asked to pay anything simply to sit. For those with few resources besides time, this is a godsend. Libraries are unofficial playgrounds for low-income families on rainy days, homeless shelters in cold months, reprieves from broken homes for grade-school-age children. They are the last bastions of quiet and calm where nothing is asked of one but to exist. Many arguments have been made about how the library is an outdated institution offering outdated services—that in the twenty-first-century how-to books on building sheds and daily newspaper copies are obsolete and the funding used for libraries ought to be reallocated to other programs. I can only assume that those who make such arguments are people who have always been comfortable with the expenditures it takes to move through the world. For those people, libraries can be about books. But not everyone has the luxury of seeing past the space.

    Libraries, as they exist in the twenty-first century, are the only remaining public domain. In a library, anyone of any walk of life can come and go as they choose, and so long as they remain respectful of the space they can remain as long as they wish. Libraries welcome everyone, offering a place to be and easily accessible resources to the most vulnerable populations, whether in downtown Chicago or small-town Oklahoma. My childhood romantic vision of the library is still close to my heart, but the very real work that public libraries do today is so much more critical than a leather-bound edition of Homer or a graphic novel fresh off the press. Those are the things the library gives me, but libraries are for everyone.

    Located in the checkroom in Union Station as I am, I see everybody that comes up the stairs.

Harry came in a little over three years ago and waited for the passengers from the 9:05 train.

    I remember seeing Harry that first evening. He wasn't much more than a thin, anxious kid then and I knew he was meeting his girl and that they would be married twenty minutes after she arrived. The passengers came up and I had to get busy. I didn't look toward the stairs again until it was nearly time for the 9:18 train and I was very surprised to see that the young fellow was still there.

    She didn't come on the 9:18 either, nor on the 9:40, and when the passengers from the 10:02 had all arrived and left, Harry was looking pretty desperate. He showed me the telegram he'd received: ARRIVE THURSDAY. MEET ME STATION. LOVE YOU. MAY.

    Harry met every train for the next three or four days, but in vain.

    Then came yesterday. I heard a cry and found that it was from Harry. He grabbed a girl who was small and dark. For a while they just hung there to each other laughing and crying and saying things without meaning. She'd say a few words like, "It was the bus station I meant" and he'd kiss her speechless and tell her the many things he had done to find her. What apparently had happened three years before was that May had come by bus, not by train, and in her telegram she meant "bus station," not "railroad station." She had waited at the bus station for days and had spent all her money trying to find Harry. Finally she got a job typing.

    "What?" said Harry. "Have you been working in town? All the time?"

    She nodded.

    "Didn't you ever come down here to the station?" He pointed across to a magazine stand. "I've been there all the time. I own it. I've watched everybody that came up the stairs."

    She began to look a little pale. Pretty soon she looked over at the stairs and said in a weak voice, "I never came up the stairs before. Harry, for three years, for three solid years, I've been right over there working right in this very station, typing, in the office of the stationmaster."

    The government says spending £4.2 million on planting trees in towns and cities will improve the quality of people's lives. But do trees really make people happy?

    Some British and US surveys suggest a thick green lawn, or well-landscaped yard can increase the government property prices by as much as 15%. But the government's Big Tree Plant campaign, which aims to plant one million trees in English urban areas over the next four years, says trees are not only good for our bank balance, but they do wonders for our happiness. And it says getting people to plant makes communities even happier. So do people really care about trees and do they improve lives? Margaret Lipscombe, director of urban programs at the Tree Council, says, “Not only are trees beautiful but they are practical. Trees also encourage healthier lifestyles and studies have shown people are calmer when trees are in their community,” A US study suggests that patients who have a view of nature through hospital windows recover better after operations.

    Ms. Lipscombe says that the trees have also been known to slow down the traffic because drivers will go more slowly when there is something in their sights. She admits some people have negative feelings about trees because they worry about slipping on berries, bird droppings on cars or blocked light.

    Ms. Lipscombe also says when she first moved into the area, there were no trees on her street. “I t was an area where there were lots of factories with high walls. It looked like an abandoned place that you didn't want, especially as a woman on your own. Now everything is different. With lots of trees around, the street looks more attractive. People are not as frightened and no longer run down the road to get home. The trees also bring people out onto the street and make a stronger community feel.”

    The American dream is the faith held by many people in the United States of America that through hard work, courage, creativity and determination, they can achieve a better life for themselves. More specifically, they agree on how to get ahead in America: get a college education, find a reliable job, and buy their own house. But do Americans still believe in that path, and if they do, is it attainable?

    The most recent National Journal poll(民意测验，投票) asked participants about the American dream, what it takes to achieve their goal, and whether or not they felt the control over their ability to be successful. Obviously, the results show that today, the idea of the American dream and what it takes to achieve it looks quite different from it did in the late 20th century. By the large, people felt that their actions and hard work — not outside forces — were the deciding factors in how their lives turned out. But the participants had definitely mixed feelings about what actions make for a better life in the current economy.

    In the last seven years, Americans have grown more pessimistic about the power of education to lead to success. Even though they see going to college as a fairly achievable goal, a majority 52 percent think that young people do not need a 4-year college education in order to be successful.

    Miguel Maeda, 42, who has a master's degree and works in public health, was the first in his family to go to college, which has allowed him to achieve a sense of financial stability(稳定) his parents and grandparents never did. While some, like Maeda, emphasized the value of a degree rather than the education itself, others still see college as a way to gain new viewpoints and life experiences. Sixty-year-old Will Fendley, who had a successful career in the military and never earned a college degree, think “personal drive” is far more important than just go to college. To Fendley, a sense of drive and purpose, as well as an effective high-school education, and basic life skills, like balancing a checkbook(支票簿), are the necessary elements for a successful life in America.