YOUNG VOICES: Books have power to transform readers' lives

The young people of today’s society are forgetting how important it is to read books for the basic benefit of expanding their minds.

Most of today’s youths only read novels in school, and though we are expanding our knowledge vastly, young adults should still go that extra mile to build on their knowledge. The people of my generation need to learn how to find an author who pulls them into reading books that can change how they view the world.

The way the author writes novels can influence the types of books we want to read. Writers who can encourage their readers to paint a picture of the novel in their heads are the people who write the best-selling books of our time. No one wants to read something they cannot visualize.

Reading books can bring us into completely different mindsets and give us the perspective of someone who is experiencing something that we might not have understood unless we are reading it from an insider’s point of view.

This is especially true in the case of real stories written by the people who experienced them firsthand. By reading and learning about other perspectives, history is kept alive and they keep us from repeating the mistakes that we have made in the past.

We have all heard about the horrors that took place during World War II in the concentration camps, but we might not have known the full extent of what happened without the writers who were willing to share these horrific stories. If these brave and amazing writers never took the time to share their stories, then the current generations could have potentially never learned, through the eyes of the prisoners, about the cruelty that took place in Europe during that time in history.

Books take us to different worlds, times, perspectives and almost any place one could imagine, but without the writers who pull people into these novels, they will die out.

We need authors who can keep drawing people into books that can teach them how to be better people and not only see in black and white, but to look at the world with all of the colors of the rainbow.