The first "Kaohsiung Reading Festival– Library on the Left, Bookstore on the Right" was planned and executed by the Kaohsiung Public Library (KPL) and Bleu & Book. It was held from Sep. 24 to Oct. 30, with a number of important speakers and arts groups invited for the first wave of events. These interdisciplinary events were characterized by double venue at the Main Library and Bleu & Book

On the first day of the event, four art and literature events were held consecutively. At 14:00, Mr. Shu Guo-zhi, winner of two major travel literature awards in Taiwan, "China Airlines Travel Literary Award" and "Eva Airlines Travel Literary Award”, gave a talk on "The Loneliness and Meaning of Travel", sharing how travelers begin to "set out" and face the unknown journey. At 15:00, Kaohsiung local band "Elephant Gym" and well-known cultural figure and director of the event, Chang Tieh-chi, would discuss “Rock and Roll Fables that Drives the Time”. At 19:00, Kaohsiung local band " Shallow Levée" opened the first night of the event with rhythms and lyrics from this Harbor City. Through the cross-border collaboration of local Kaohsiung writers Lin Da-yang and Yan Shu-xia and Golden Melody winner, pianist Huang Yu-hsiang, music was read, and the memories of their hometown Kaohsiung were whispered.

The winner of this year's National Award for Arts, Ping Lu, is an accomplished writer who has broken new ground in time and space in terms of her creative skills, her refinement of words, her diversity of forms, and her depth of subject matter. She was selected as one of the 2021 "Writers of the Year" by KingStone Bookstore, and is also the winner of the Golden Awards, the Golden Tripod Awards, and Wu San- lien Awards. She shared "The Fun of Fiction ~ The Mirror of Stories" at Bleu & Book at 17:00 on the first day of the event.

This series of events combined the five highlights of music, film, specialties, literary celebrities, and Kaohsiung food with reading, spanning the Main Library, Bleu & Book, TAi Urban Store, the lawn on the first floor and the Intertidal Zone on the fourth floor, and collaborating with different designers to curate the space with the focus on the important cultural and reading trends in Kaohsiung and Taiwan.

What followed on the second day was famous authors, such as Yeh Yi-lan, Chiao Yuan-pu, Chang Tieh-chi, Tsai Rui-shan, Pei Wei, and Hong Ai-ju, and editors from major publishing houses were invited to share the stage, such as Hsu Ting-ting from Crown Publishing Company,  Cheng Ching-hung from Avanguard Publishing House, Yeh Mei-yao from ThinKingDom,  Liao Chih-feng from Asia Culture Publishing Company, Chien Hsin-yen from Infortress Publishing Ltd., Cheng Wei-hsuan from Suncolor Culture Publishing Company and Chao Cheng-min from China Times Publishing Company. They shared the rationality and sensibility required for the publishing industry.