reading can make you a better person. here's evidence.
Celebrate #EmpathyDay with a good book. Last year, a prosecutor in the US state of Virginia asked a judge to hand down an unusual sentence. Five teens had defaced a historic structure -- a Jim Crow-era schoolhouse for African-American children -- with swastikas and other racist graffiti. The judge agreed with the prosecutor -- and she sentenced the teens to reading . The teens were to choose books from a list of books that illuminate bigotry and hatred, among them Elie Wiesel's Night , Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings , and Arthur Miller's The Crucible . Sentenced to read With at least one of those teens, it worked. This person (not identified), who is 16 or 17 years old, agreed to share his reading list and his thoughts with a reporter for The New York Times . The list included The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, The Tortilla Curtain by T.C. Boyle, and Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. The books he found most affecting w...