Les Mis and Harry Potter

So the only thing that I have read “for pleasure” in the last twelve months is a condensed English version of the book Les Miserables, and technically I haven’t finished it yet. Over the summer I was pretty much booked out thanks to an onslaught of required readings my final semester of high school. Then came BYU, with fifty hours of homework a week, plus swimming, class, and if I found some time to eat or talk to people I jumped at the chance. I do think reading for pleasure is important. If you have the time, reading a book can let you escape into another world. I always enjoyed leaving my problems behind for half an hour to read about the problems that other people are having, even if the characters are fictional. I think that is why I enjoyed the Harry Potter series so much. When I picked up a Harry Potter book, I could just forget my problems for a couple of hours and think about what Harry should do. Because the plot was based in a fictional universe that I had never been to, I didn’t understand anything better than he did – until the later novels anyway – and therefore felt comfortable trying to analyze his problems and attempting to create potential solutions. I do not know if I have ever been able to change how pleasurable any one writing assignment is for me. I try to choose an interesting topic, but after that I do not think I can alter how much I will enjoy the assignment. If I get to give my own opinion on something that I am interested in and have significant, logical evidence to back my position, chances are that I will really enjoy writing my paper. If I am writing a paper that has a topic of no interest to me and drags on aimlessly forever, I will want to kill myself before I finish it (i.e. my Junior Research Paper on a book that I hated). Reading for pleasure is much different than writing for pleasure. I can pick up a good book anytime, if I think I have time to actually read it. On the other hand, I will probably never write a sentence if I don’t feel that it is absolutely necessary for one reason or another.