Reading—the thing we are so used to dreading when school time comes. The 3-5 books we must read (and in the most terrible situation, have to annotate) becomes the part of our English class that high schoolers come to dislike. Something that can be so beautiful and honestly, useful, drifts to become something we no longer look forward to. Reading can be a very good way to escape the life that surrounds us, and for a second puts us into a whole new world. 

When we were younger, we read fun animated books just for the fun of it. That is enjoyable reading, reading freely—just getting lost in the book without focusing on anything else. It comes about in high school, when students are taught to investigate deeper into the text. Now, doing this naturally on occasion is something different, it’s natural. But when we are told and instructed on the correct way to analyze every piece of text, it gets a bit tedious. 

A simple pleasure of life that gets ruined simply because it has become something required as part of our school curriculum. Teresa Nasser ’23 said, “I used to read all the time, and usually only do during summer or breaks. 

How much free reading do us high schoolers complete, simply for fun?Definitely not much. Chloe Clark ’23 said, “I can’t remember the last time I read a book for fun.” 

A huge part of reading is our attitude towards it, how we see it, and how we choose to read. Saying this, it is very important for the reader to be able to freely choose what they read, when they want to read and what they take away from it. That is where the joy in reading comes, being able to escape your world and enjoy another, the way we want to. This school reading however, does the opposite. 

By not being able to make these little decisions about our reading time, it no longer is a stress relieving, fun thing to do, but often causes stress and is not fun. There are expectations that we need to meet and see from these books, we must see it the same way as our teacher and we have no choice but to read about a topic we might not even be interested in.  

As children, we love to read—we love to be able to sit down and read a good book—but that time slowly ends as you get into high school, or simply school in general. 

While school reading is something that is unavoidable, there is still a way to separate that from our own leisure reading. Since it is something that we enjoy when it’s on our own, on our own pace with our own interpretation, it can bring back the sense of happiness associated with reading that we used to have. It is such a great way to escape our own lives and also very much improve the reading comprehension skills we have overall, it is something we shouldn’t skip on.