Reading is my favorite thing to do. I am constantly reading. Most people I know will say that they hate reading, or it is boring. I find reading to be the most interesting thing in the world. There are so many things people can learn just by simply reading a book. Reading can help improve your speech and your vocabulary. When most people do things like go to the beach during the summer, going on vacation somewhere, going to amusements parks/water parks, work at a summer job that they have, go camping, etc, I sit at home and read book after book. Reading books during the summer is when I normally read the most. Over the summer I have so much free time and I spend that free time with a book. The Host by Stephenie Meyer, The Chamber of Secrets by J.K. Rowling, Theories of Relativity by Barbara Haworth-Attard are a few of the books that I read over the summer.

Normally I do not read romance books or books that have a lot of romance in them. Although I do not like to read them I do have quite a few that go into that genre/show aspects of the genre such as Beastly by Alex Flinn, I’ll Give You the Sun by Jandy Nelson, and The Beginning of Everything by Robyn Schneider. The Host is a science-fiction and romance novel. The two main characters are Wanderer/Wanda (the “parasite”) and Melanie (the host). An alien race (the Souls) take over the human race. They take over their minds after being inserted into humans at the spinal cord. The Souls use humans as their host. Even though Wanderer has taken over Melanie’s mind and body, she is still very present and active in Wanderer’s mind. Wanderer finds enough courage to go out into the desert to try and find Melanie’s family and her lover. Wanderer feels Melanie’s emotions so she feels the love Melanie has for her family and for her lover, Jared. She risks both their lives going out in the desert trying to find them, and they find her before she finds them. The two of them go through many hard times after being found by her uncle, Jeb. It takes everyone around them a very long time to come to tolerate Wanderer and accept her. When the movie first came out I went to go see it. I did not know it was based off of a book for the longest time. Personally I prefer the book over the movie, but for The Host I equally enjoyed both the book and the movie.

Growing up my mother never let my siblings and I watch or read the Harry Potter series. As I got older I have gotten more of a say in what I want to watch and read. I recently got the first three books in the series, and I was more than stoked about it. I fell in absolute love with the movies the first time I watched them all. With such great love I had for the movies, I knew that I would love the book ten times more. The Chamber of Secrets by J.K. Rowling is the second book of the series. It takes place at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry during Harry Potter’s second year of school. Harry, his friends, and everybody who is at Hogwarts at the time all “relive” the past during that year. Most horrific events that happen during the book have happened 50 years prior at Hogwarts. Tom Riddle (Voldemort), the one who opened the Chamber the last time, manipulates Ginny Weasley (Harry’s best friend’s sister) and he makes her open the Chamber of Secrets. If it weren’t for Harry Potter and his friends Tom Riddle’s plan would have worked and a Muggleborn (a witch/wizard who is born of two non-magical parents) would have died. Harry saved many student’s lives and he saved Hogwarts from being closed down. Personally I love every little thing about Harry Potter. I am a huge fan of J.K. Rowling and I love her work. The books, in my opinion, are absolutely terrific.

Theories of Relativity by Barbara Haworth-Attard is a young adult/teen realistic fiction novel. Theories of Relativity is about a teenage boy, Dylan, who was kicked out of his home by his mother and is now living on the streets. Because he is living on the streets he cannot get a job and provide things like food, toiletries, and warm clothes for the upcoming winter. He makes a couple friends that live out on the streets too, Twitch and Jenna. Throughout the whole book every time a higher authority tries to help out the teens and adults living on the streets they do not want to take the opportunity to fix their life. Each teen in the book has a different reason why they do not want help from higher authorities but they are all pretty close together. Jenna ran away from home, so if a higher authority realizes that she is the girl who ran away from home they will take her back there. And to have run away from home she must have a reason to not want to go back. Dylan’s reason for not wanting help is that he does not want to leave his brothers behind. Even though his mother kicked him out, he secretly goes and sees his younger brothers at their school and even sometimes at their house. If he were to get put into a foster home he will never get to see his brothers again. Dylan meets this guy, Glen, who is willing to help Dylan out to get him back on his feet. Glen gets Dylan a small job working for him, but Dylan is not willing to let Glen fully help him out with his life. At the end of the book Dylan ends up meeting his father, who he had never met before. His father is just like him, living on the streets with no money, no job, nothing. Seeing his father like that makes him realize he needs to get his life set straight. At the very end he allows himself to let Glen help him out so that he can get off of the streets for good.

There are so many people out there in the world who think that reading is boring, stupid, a waste of time, etc. I think the very opposite. Reading gets your mind working and I love that. I love that my mind is putting pieces of a story together, that it is visualizing every word that I am reading, and that it is consuming every word on the paper. Summer reading is the main thing that I do over the summer. I have so much free time on my hands in the summer and that allows me to read book after book.