I’ve been thinking about the way I have been recently reading. For school assignments, I have to designate times of day to read novels and figure out how long it takes me to read a certain amount of pages. Although reading should be a leisurely task, when assigned, I find it more of a chore than a pleasure.

When I read a book for fun, page numbers don’t matter and I get lost in the story. When I was an early teen, I picked up the Lord of the Rings trilogy and finished it within six months. On that turning point for me, I went to my mother to tell her of my accomplishment, and she immediately instructed me to begin Gone With the Wind. Incredulous, and taken aback (because she didn’t congratulate me on my feat), she assigned me fifty pages a day of the Margaret Mitchell novel, and since it was summer time, I had no excuse not to spend each day immersed in a book.

Because I was instructed to read, I automatically hated the book. It wasn’t until several months later that I eventually got the gist of the story and fell in love with the characters and the Old South. Here is the question: should we force ourselves to read, even though we would rather be doing something else? Will we eventually learn to love the story, even if we have to turn off our computers and cellphones for three hours? For some, it is a mindless decision: of course I want to read! There are some who have never had a problem with reading anything they are given, but there are others for whom it is a laborious task, especially for school assignments.

I’ve often had to read endless pages of women’s studies work, classical reading and hand-outs on boring topics, and those are the times in which I glance at the clock and find my eyes continuously falling to the bottom of the page to see how far I have come. Other readings, such as short stories or Harry Potter will be finished in a flash and leave me pining for more.

Maybe it depends on the actual work, but as much as I love to engage myself in a fantasy, I know once I graduate from college and have distractions throughout my day, I will notice the books collecting dust on the bookshelf. I will always want to read, and maybe I will have to put myself on a schedule to actually get it done. Some of us can read without looking at it as a chore, but others may need a fire lit under our asses to get the brain churning and the mind to open up.