Read, Listen, Eat! Marathon Read 2024 will be Thursday, September 26 from 10:00 a.m.–10:00 p.m. in the Dewey Room (W043) within the Collaboration Commons of the Pattee Library. This year’s them is “Youth on Fire: Stories of Growing Up.” This free event is an in-person community reading that is open to the public.

We need readers! Anyone can sign up to read for five minutes. Volunteers will supply the books everyone is reading from and will show you where to start reading and when to stop. Readers receive a free T-shirt.

Food will be provided at points throughout the event.

Interested in volunteering to staff the event or have questions? Email Joe Bueter at jbueter@psu.edu.

READINGS: House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, The Book of My Lives by Aleksander Hemon, Born a Crime: Stories from a South Africa Childhood by Trevor Noah, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz, and the graphic novels Town Boy by Lat and Pashmina by Nidhi Chanani, as well as other texts

The period of adolescence and young adulthood is one of the more impactful times in a person’s life, and literature that taps into these experiences guides young people through turbulent times and reminds adults of the shedding of innocence young people experience globally every day. It has also been thirty-five years since the creation and signing of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, an international human rights treaty that led to significant changes in the treatment of children across a variety of areas.