I have loved books for as long as I can remember. I would live for Independent Reading after lunch, and loved finally being able to read books that I saw my family and friends read first (*cough* Harry Potter *cough*). While most kids replaced TV shows and cartoons with the books they once enjoyed reading, I never grew out of it. I continue to carry this “nerdy” hobby around with me, and it influenced my life so much that I got a book tattooed on my arm (and I haven’t regretted it once, so boom!).

You could assume this love for books is iron-clad and I love the experience of reading every book that I come across, but that is definitely not the case. My first year of college was a test to this hobby that I have loved since kindergarten, when books (and an obscene amount at that) were given to me in almost every class with the requirement that we had to read them in this unbelievably short period of time. While I understand I will be reading ancient world literature in my humanities class that is about ancient world literature, that doesn’t mean I have to enjoy it, and that doesn't mean I can do it in a week.

With that said, summer came around and I found myself with free time that I had only dreamed about throughout my freshman year. So, I started reading again. Instead of skipping through pages and skimming SparkNotes (skimming—I wasn’t even fully reading them) about books that maybe I would be interested in if I actually had time to tackle them, I could sit down and do what I have enjoyed doing for all of my life—fully immerse myself in the world I would be reading about. Not only did I have time to lay down and read a book, but I could choose the book I read, the amount of pages I read, and how long I would read for. WHAT FREEDOM.

That’s the beauty of books, a quality that is whisked away with the majority of the books you read for school. The time that was once used for “independent reading” in elementary school (the only reading in school where you can enjoy the freedom that comes with reading) was replaced by a stack of books that only someone with a ridiculously fast reading ability could actually physically read in the time that a college student usually has.

In high school, most of the books we had to read were ones that didn’t really interest me, but I didn’t have a choice but to read them. In college, I’m being introduced to books that I actually want to read (the English student that I am) but I just don’t simply have the time to.

So, that’s why reading in the summer is such a beautiful, and somewhat understated, experience. You have this freedom to read the books you want to without worrying about the 10 other books you have to read in the next 3 days. You can choose the world you want to experience, the genre that most interests you, or the one with the cool cover. And that’s why I got a book tattooed on my arm.