It's Friday. Are you reading anything this weekend?

You guys asked me to do more book sharing, so here I go...

I just finished a book that stopped me in my tracks.

It’s short. Plain English. Simple sentences.

And yet it took me weeks to read.

Because the weight of it — the stolen life — was almost too heavy to carry in one sitting.

A girl who was kidnapped at 11. Held for 18 years. Became a mother of two inside captivity. (禁室培慾)

She wrote in plain English because that’s all she had. No embellishment. No literary tricks. Just memory.

What broke me wasn’t the horror — it was how visible everything was.

She described her days so vividly that I could see the rooms, the routines, the small windows. And the most haunting part?

When you look at a map, it wasn’t even that secretive. Neighbors. Streets. Shops. But no one spotted anything. No one suspected.

You can feel that when she writes.

The claustrophobia. The silence of the outside world. The details so painfully clear and loud in her head — because there was nothing else she could do except let them out on the page.

I’m not sharing this to depress you. I’m sharing it because it reminded me why we read: not for escape, but for witness.

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P.S. We will be opening the doors of my signature coaching program "THINK & SPEAK like a native" soon. If you can send me 5 expressions that you learned from this little sharing, I can drop you a $500 coupon. (12 spots only!)

Let's make reading cool again,

Ms. Truda