The Importance Of Reading In Literature

Young people read more in the past than they do now. Through two authors, we see two different perspectives that inform each other. One of the author, Bauerlein, gave us a logical perspective through a statistic which states that young people from ages 18 to 24 who read literature had declined from 59.8 percent in 1982 to 42.8 percent in 2002. This shows that there is a decline in reading for young people. While, another author, Barry Lopez, asserts that we need our stories to care for each other and to stay alive which is an emotional perspective. We should take stories to heart because through our stories we find our identities, past on knowledge, and teach lessons. We find our identities in literature like stories. For example,

In the story, Aesop’s The Boy Who Cried Wolf which is about a boy who told a bunch of lies, and when he finally tells the truth no one believed him. The lesson from this story is about how people shouldn’t tell lies or else people would not believe them when they tell the truth. In Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Game, Katniss Everdeen sacrificed herself as a tribute, in order to save her sister, Primrose Everdeen. From The Hunger Game, the lesson is that courage and bravery are essential in the face of adversity. Another lesson in this story is about how being self-sufficient is important to ensure your survival. In the past, I read Macbeth by William Shakespeare, the story is about Macbeth killing the king for power and his ambition lead to his own downfall. The lesson from this story is that killing is wrong, and how power can corrupt you. As I mentioned before, reading stories is important because stories can teach us moral lessons, and it’s also a good way to learn. The moral values that these lesson teaches can reveal what will happen if we don’t follow these moral lesson. Sometimes, themes and topics in story can happen in real life too. The moral lessons we learn from stories can be applied to this competitive, material