October 13-19 was Teen Read Week, an annual event that promotes reading among young adults. The event was held for the first time in 1998, by the Young Adult Library Services Association, otherwise known as YALSA.
In honor of Teen Read Week, Eleanor Roosevelt High School’s own library participated by holding a raffle and putting out books for students to take a look at. Throughout the week, whenever someone checked out a book, they received a raffle ticket. The winners each won a new flash drive.
School librarian Susan Peterson, when talking about Teen Read Week, commented, “It’s read for fun, pick any genre you want, so I featured everything from optical illusions to mystery and fright.”
According to the YALSA’s website about Teen Read Week, “Teen Read Week’s theme is Read For The Fun Of It. Every year, YALSA offers a new sub-theme to serve as a basis for developing programs in schools, public libraries, and bookstores.”
This year, said sub-theme was Seek the Unknown @ your library, voted upon by teenagers online. This theme is designed to persuade young adults to discover new things through books and stories.
Teens can also vote for the Teens’ Top Ten, a list of ten books published in the past year. This year, some of the winners were Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein, Insurgent by Veronica Roth, and Every Day written by David Leviathan. In total, there were 28 nominees, including books by Donna Cooner and Johan Harstad.
Young Adult literature has been flourishing recently, with people of many different ages reading it, not only the teenagers the books are geared towards. Several, such as The Fault in Our Stars, The Hunger Games, and The Perks of Being a Wallflower, have or are being made into movies. The genre’s subjects range from 80s high school romance to mythological summer camps on Long Island to eye-opening books about teens living with disability (such as Out of My Mind, by Sharon M. Draper). Teen Read Week aims to coax more teens into this world, and Ms. Peterson summed up this goal very well:
“It’s just to encourage everyone to read for fun.”
