Freeway - What do young people read?

What do young people read?

According to our librarian youths mostly read self-biographical books about women and children with a tragic life-story. Dave Pelzer who has written the book "A child called It" is especially popular. He, and Christina Waldén are the most popular books' that girls read. Christina Waldén's books are about young women's situation in our society today. Love novels seems to be very popular too. When you compare what young women in upper secondary school and old ladies read, there's not so much of a difference. Everybody likes Dave Pelzer and Liza Marklund's books. Liza Marklund has written two books about a women who escape from her old husband who abuses her all the time, and refuses to let go. It's a true story, and Liza Marklunds has followed her for many years, uptil now when she has moved to the US.
The biggest difference you can see in what people read is that boys mostly read fantasy-novels. That is a genre the old ladies haven't discovered yet.

Sofie's world - Jostein Gaarder
Jostein Gaarder is a Norwegian writer, who has written lots of books, both books for young people and books for adults. He wrote Sofies world because he had noticed there weren't a single book about philosophy for youths and therefor he decided to write his own. The books is about Sofie, a 14 year old girl from Norway. One day when she comes home from school she finds a letter dedicated to her in the mailbox. There is no stamp or sender. The envelope has just a note that says: Who are you? She gets more and more letters, with strange questions, and different answers to them from philosophers in the history. The letters she gets turns out to be a correspondence course in philosophy. Sofie learns to question things, and think about her life, and the universe. After a while, she finds the man who has sent her all the letters. The philosopher. She also starts to find cards addressed to Hilde Möller Knag from her father. Hilde's things starts to lying around in Sofie's room, and everything gets more and more turned around the closer they get to Sofie's birthday, and on her birthday, the philosopher shows her the truth about her life. The end is very interesting, because you have to use some of the knowledge you've got from the book, to get what he is trying to say with it. Everything doesn't have to be like it seems to be. An other good thing with the book is that Gaarder tells about lots of different ways to look at the world, and life. But he never gives a clue about what he thinks is right or wrong, as the reader you get to figure your opinion out yourself. It's very objectively written. He uses a good language, easy, and always leading forward. The book is over 500 pages, but you read it very fast, because every chapter is short, and you just wa nt to read the next one too. I read the whole book in just a few days because it interested me so much. I'm usually not so fond of this kind of books, but this one, I really like, and I would definitely recommend it to everybody who'd like to learn more about philosophy, and life in an easy way. Jostein truly has a lot of fantasy, he kind of blows your mind with his outgoing ideas. It's like being in a overdeveloped child's' mind. A child's fantasy but he takes it to the next level.

The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath is an American writer, very famous for her poems, specially the ones in Ariel, a posthumous poetry collection. She has written lots of short stories too, but she only wrote one novel. At first, she didn't even want to publish it, because she wasn't sure it was good enough, and it was first published under a pseudonym. And after a divorce from her husband Ted Hughes she got so depressed she killed herself, and she nev er got to see or hear how loved her book is. Because it truly is a state of the art. The language is amazing, personal but beautiful, you can tell she is a poet. It's a very self-biographical book about Easter Greenwood. She has just finished school and won a scholarship for a novel she has written. In the beginning of the book, Easter is in New York, to get her prize. At first, things are pretty okay, but she can feel things aren't the way they should. When she gets home to her mother, she finds out she didn't get in to the writing-course she wanted to go. Almost immediately she gets really depressed, can't eat, can't sleep, read or anything. Her mother takes her to a psychiatrists. But he doesn't even try to help her, instead she is send to his clinic for electric chocks. They terrify her so much she directly goes home again. But things just get worse and worse and she ends up at a mental hospital. There, she looses her virginity in a dramatic way, and also, she meets and old friend at one of the hospitals, who later on kills herself. The way I see it, you don't get to know the end, and I don't mean the end of just the book of course, but the end of the story. It's hard to know if she starts a new happy life after the end of the book, or if she actually kills herself. If you look at Sylvias own life it doesn't get easier to find it out either. But I guess you kind of gets to decide yourself. It gives you a good view over how it could, and in many ways still can be, to have a mental sickness. It shows alot what's going on in a depressed young womans mind. It also shows how psychical sick people were treated, and understood at that time.