Why read books?

Written by Emily O’Brien

Some people ask “Why should I read books?” or even just say “Reading is Boring” But what they don’t understand about books is that they have been written for thousands of years and they are how we learn about our past.

Right now in school, 8th graders are reading the play adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank. This play is one of the most important and well kept first hand accounts from WWII, but kids in our grade don’t even realize this.
Loa Turner said – “Reading Anne Frank for the first time made me understand it more than watching any documentary”
She says this meaning that you can watch a documentary about anything, and maybe that works for you, but books will give you the best chance of understanding what you need to know.

I understand that you may not like the books we read at school, but that’s what recreational reading or reading for fun is for. You can choose any book you want to read whether that be fiction or nonfiction, romance or horror, fantasy or contemporary. You can choose to read a 10 page book about Lebron James or a 400 page book about a fictional character.

Mrs. Barner says, “Books teach us empathy and show us how to deal with situations in real life.”
The themes in these stories are important to everyday life whether the theme is as simple as Kindness or as complex as Identity or Morality. You can learn things that you might not talk much about in the real world.

You may also say that you can just watch the movie or the show adaptations of the book, but I can speak from experience that they don’t always, or even usually do much justice to the book. Take Percy Jackson and the Olympians. It has two movies, the first and the second book, and if you have read the books you know that they do no justice to the story, themes, characters, or places. But that might be an extreme example so what about The Hunger Games? Yes, the movies are honestly great and they show much of what happens in the book, but they also miss a few major plot points or scenes that were very important to many readers. For example, scenes that made me cry in the book didn’t cause as much distress in the movie.

Blake Dunaway said – “Books are a way to express ourselves.”
Books are how we talk to our past to learn what people knew. History repeats itself, and if we don’t learn or read about it, we won’t recognize when it does.