The most important thing you can read during your time in college is a book with absolutely no intellectual value. Something like Fifty Shades of Grey, Twilight, A Series of Unfortunate Events or Harry Potter for the 12th time. These books may not broaden your intellectual horizons or make you a more engaged member of society, but they’re still very important.
Books like these, the mindless stuff that we can absorb in a few hours, are what make reading fun. When I was a kid, I used to love reading. I would go to the library, get 30 kids’ books, read them in a couple of weeks and then go back and get more. Then, as I got older, this reading for fun was replaced by reading textbooks and Wikipedia or by not reading at all. Reading became a boring thing I had to do, and TV and movies became the fun ways to spend my free time.
The thing is, though, reading is awesome. It is a great form of entertainment that gives you a chance to completely escape from the world in a way visual media just can’t provide. Books force you to picture everything yourself, so your imagination forms vivid images that no amount of special effects could replace. You see yourself in the books, which you can’t do to nearly the same degree in movies.
So among all your readings for classes, it’s important to occasionally pick up a book with no intellectual value and just read it. It’ll remind you that reading is supposed to be fun, textbooks or otherwise. And if nothing else, it’ll at least make you more culturally aware when all your friends make references to the pop fiction you’ve now read.
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