"When life slows down, people are urged to meditate," she says. "People who are accompanied by literature are strong because they've recruited an army for their minds and souls."
Echoing Dong's continuous devotion, again, a star-studded list of guests has been drafted to appear on the program. For example, in the first episode of the new season, author Mo Yan, the 2012 winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, shares the emotionally complex books he read when he was young.
"I was often in pain when I read poems, and I even yelled," Mo Yan says on the show. "And I enjoyed immersing myself into the novels and their characters.
"Literature is about souls," he says. "It's intangible and you cannot touch it. But you can always feel it."
In the show, Mo Yan reads an excerpt from his own novella Radish that reveals a child's extraordinary grit and resilience when facing a painful family dilemma.
In the new season, more guests who are not from cultural circles speak about the strength of literature supporting their career.
When Yang Yuanxi, an academician at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, reads an excerpt from Austrian author Stefan Zweig's Sternstunden der Menschheit (Stellar Moments of Humankind), the audience will feel his sense of ambition and work ethic when designing China's BeiDou Navigation Satellite System.
Yu Qiqing, a topographer, joined the expedition to measure the height of Qomolangma, known as Mount Everest in the West, in 1975.In the spotlight, Yu also shows his devotion to working in the wild, his sense of awe in the face of nature, and memories of his fallen teammates through the reading of a stanza from Hymn for the Light by famous poet Ai Qing.
