Books, the New Prozac?
Book Bench – :”A friend gave me Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar” at a sleepover for my fourteenth birthday. After the other girls fell asleep, I stayed up and read the entire novel. A likely choice for a moody teen-ager already contemplating the inexorable passing of her youth.
So when I heard that a study published this month had found that reading books improves the moods of adolescents, I became curious. Did the study’s authors take the types of books into consideration?”
I remember being a moody teenager and loving to read anything I could get my hands on. It was the escape I needed from what I thought was my horrible life (which actually wasn’t…I was just a moody teenager).
I think that’s what the books can do. You can read a happy book and gain the boost you need or read a book about a miserable life and maybe see that you don’t have it so bad after all. Or maybe you see something of a parallel to your own life and realize that you’re not alone. That is the power of books.