I find that reading is an entertainment in itself; a fantastical vacation for the mind that surpassses soma*. Along with the pleasant fever that spreads through the brain, books can display superior technique in activating, actualizing, and acknowledging affairs with an astonishing academic accessory: alliteration. The often-overlooked classic novel still falls to the bottom of the pecking order when compared to the cliche forms of modern entertainment that dominate the media and permeate young minds.
     

The prose of a novel, as with any art form, can be expressed in a variety of ways, each providing its own merit and reason for the love of reading. The spectrum extends from Shakespearean English with the downy touch that ever fights, ever fleets through the years but still endures all the way, offering timeless truths that when presented by an astute Literature educator with a discerning hand are such as an onion, each layer with an increasing amount of emotion involved as the turn of events unfold. Moving onward to this fine chap Mr. Dickens, his prose locked snugly together in a veritable maze of chimney pots and broken stairs, superior names, the densest fog, and stories, oh! the stories that elope one’s attention away from care, tickling the brain and making clocks run wild. Dickens is followed by Collins and Roth with their modern prose, which hurts my eyes with white light as I feed my brain with the guilty pleasure of a teen dystopian. Relatable, yet oversaturated. No fear, though, the common first-person present tense point of view will soon be rendered obsolete with the arrival of Anderson’s chic order of meg-thoughts, which will help you like think about how people are liking to focus on one thing without any consequence and sort of lead you to new thoughts of your own that can maybe change you for the good. Now to Orwell, which opens the mind to visions of both the transcendent and the hellish, showing a mirror to human nature, and asking what you can do to stop the decline of society.
     

As a whole, reading primes the mind for ageless truths while using leisure time in a productive manner, and giving much-needed entertainment along with relatable characters. Fine books provide new thoughts and opinions that broaden our horizons, and are a mirror to the curious soup of human nature, but one that can be appropriately re-seasoned.
     

And that is why I read (a lot).

 *Soma is a happiness-inducing drug that is examined in depth in Huxley’s classic novel, Brave New World. It is said in the book, “One cubic centimeter cures ten gloomy sentiments.”