Voices from the Teen Advisory Board

Welcome to the second post written by members of the MCLS Teen Advisory Board. Throughout the year, we periodically share essays about library life by members of our Teen Advisory Board (TAB). TAB members help with programming, suggest books for purchase, and write the quarterly TAB magazine. Today’s post is special because we are featuring essays from brothers Rishabh and Dhruv. Rishabh shares how he came to love reading during the COVID-19 pandemic, and Dhruv writes about the value of reliable and authoritative news sources for teens. We hope you enjoy hearing from some of the teens serving their library community.

How Reading for Pleasure Helped Reduce My Screen Time

By Rishabh Ramaswamy

Hi! My name is Rishabh, and I am a sophomore attending the Pennington School. Some of my hobbies include playing tennis, performing on the piano and double bass, and reading. While I can proudly say that reading is a hobby of mine today, this was not always the case as I have had my fair share of struggles with reading, especially at school.

Ever since I was a toddler, my parents always made sure to read my brother and me bedtime stories, which we always looked forward to. Some of our favorites were The Very Hungry Caterpillar and Where the Wild Things Are, because of all the vivid pictures that complement the otherwise dull stories. But as I transitioned into the latter stages of elementary school, all the fun imagery and cartoonish drawings were replaced with paragraphs and paragraphs of dense text. As a result, I struggled to enjoy most traditional books, so I avoided them as much as I could and only read graphic novels in my free time.

My aversion to traditional chapter books continued until I was in 7th grade, during the worst parts of the COVID-19 pandemic. The workload for virtual school was very light, which left me with a ridiculous amount of free time on my hands. The only problem: how to spend it? Because of the pandemic, even going outside to play was met with great reluctance from our parents, which left my brother and me indoors for much of the quarantine period. I ended up turning to my computer for entertainment. Every day, I would spend hours and hours holed up in my room, watching any random video that came up on my YouTube recommended feed. My eyes would frequently get very tired after these long sessions, so I could not do anything else but sleep after watching all those videos. I would get frequent headaches and found that my concentration during school decreased dramatically. My parents noticed this and decided to take action.

My dad is a very heavy reader. He proposed, with the support of my mom, to replace all the time I spent on the computer with reading, as it would at least be a more cerebral task than numbing my brain with videos. I opposed it at first, because of how boring I thought reading was, but my parents ignored me and went ahead and borrowed Roots by Alex Hayley from the library. Once I relented and started reading the book, I experienced the familiar distaste for reading that I had for many years prior. I decided to keep reading, however, as I wanted to at least try to follow what my parents instructed. Suddenly, things changed around a hundred or so pages into the story. The book really started to pick up, and I found that, for the first time, I was invested in the storyline of a book. As I kept reading more and more, I became more and more invested in the new characters and storylines. This book made me realize that it wasn’t that I did not like reading, but that I had not been reading the right books for me.

After finishing Roots, I wanted to read more. Once school ended, my brother and I started biking to the Plainsboro Public Library once or twice a week, bringing back a hefty stack of books each time. Upon my dad’s request, I started reading John Grisham’s law thriller books and quickly polished off most of them that summer. Reading was no longer a chore for me, but instead a fun, exciting hobby.

Reading frequently in my free time came with other benefits. As intended, my screen time went down dramatically, and even when I got my phone, I was not spending much time on it. But I also felt much, much, more energized and happy, a stark contrast from before. I also was able to concentrate for longer periods of time without a lot of effort. Relating to school, the required reading was no longer a form of torture, but enjoyable as I became more acquainted with reading traditional chapter books. Now as a high schooler, I make sure to read when I can, and my love for reading is still growing.

The Library's News Oasis: Unveiling the Power of Quality Journalism

By Dhruv Ramaswamy

Consuming news concerning critical national and international topics probably isn’t on the average teenager’s priority list, and it wasn’t on mine for the first half of last summer. I get it: articles about the intricacies of the economy and political developments seem uninteresting and irrelevant to one’s daily life. However, after spending some time at the library, I am convinced otherwise.

It was a slow day at the library. I had been volunteering there at the summer reading desk, informing patrons about the various programs at the library. On one particularly slow day, I decided to wend my way across the library to the magazine section. There, I saw two newspapers that caught my attention: The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Earlier in the week, my mom suggested I read The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times in order to learn more about business and world news. I also recognized The Trentonian from its title containing “Trenton,” New Jersey’s state capital. I decided to pick up The Wall Street Journal.

Upon heading back to the desk, I skimmed the paper to find interesting articles and eventually found one discussing the financial health and future prospects of Netflix in The Wall Street Journal. As an owner of Disney and Paramount shares (of which I own 2 shares each, with both suffering a combined 40% loss in value since purchase) and with Disney and Paramount being major competitors to Netflix, this article piqued my interest. After reading it, I had learned about how Netflix’s crackdown on password sharing, new advertising tier, and new content has accelerated subscriber growth once again despite ongoing screenwriter’s strikes. Overall, I found the article fascinating, and appreciated its insights on this topic. I learned that my decision to invest in Disney and Paramount had been ill-informed. I should have consulted the proper resources - like information concerning big media companies from acclaimed sources - to have made a better decision.

Over the course of a few weeks, I also discovered many other high quality, appealing articles and authors in both of newspapers. One of my favorite journalists writing for The New York Times is Kenneth Chang. Unlike many other journalists, who use fancy language that is impossibly difficult to decipher, Chang writes in a clean, simple way about fascinating topics, like space, quantum computing, nanotechnology, and more. One article he authored discussed NASA initiatives to integrate nuclear power into rockets to get to Mars in half the time. Another one of his reports talked about the recently discovered supposed superconductor, LK-99, and its implications for technology. The Wall Street Journal also has very good articles and authors. I read a report about the Union of Auto Workers and their demands on big auto companies, written by Nora Eckert, a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Along the way, I learned how unions impact profitability and output for the company. Overall, reading the journals and reports that interested me made me better informed about breakthroughs in science, technology, and business.

Looking at the bigger picture, I think it is crucial to step away from sensationalized news, which oversimplifies and blemishes our understanding of multifaceted issues. The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times offer quality journalism that, for the most part, is unsensational and factual. Although these sources have their biases - especially in the opinion and editorial sections - it is impossible for journalism to never have any bias, and in these sources the bias is oftentimes marginal. This is one of the ways that a teen can consume news in an engaging and informing manner.

All in all, spending time in the library's magazine section opened my eyes to the world of quality journalism. The Mercer County Library System not only offers print versions of these newspapers in their physical locations (which I prefer), it also offers subscriptions to these services online for patrons. Now, I can read these journals no matter where I am in the world. Thanks to the library, I can expand my knowledge and gain a new appreciation for keeping up with the news. Maybe it's time you got a library card!