From the minute my parents sat me down with my first book and spent hours teaching me how to read, I knew I had found my passion. While other children preferred to watch television after school, I could not wait to get home from class and curl up with whatever book I was reading at the time. This interest and desire to read have in no way lessened as I have grown older. Instead, it has intensified and manifests itself as a part of my life every day.

While I, of course, have my fair share of movies and television shows that I enjoy, I have found that even my favorite movies cannot equate to the love I feel for books. Movies are wonderful works of art with plenty of emotion and meaning, and watching a movie with friends is certainly a great way to spend a night, but I find that there is always something missing.

Movies lay everything out for you -- you know what the main characters look like and what the backup characters look like, you know what a character’s bedroom looks like or what his or her high school looks like, and you know what song the director believes embodies that particular scene best. There is little left to the imagination, so you are essentially viewing the storyline exactly the way the screenwriter or the director wants you to take it all in. The portrayal of your beloved characters is placed entirely in the hands of whichever lucky actor or actress gets to take on the grand role of bringing the character to life.

With books, you as a reader have a lot more room to imagine things for yourself and interpret things the way you feel and the way you relate to most. It always amazes me how an author can describe a character a certain way, yet each reader will have his or her own personal imagination in his or her mind of what the character looks like. A description as simple as “the child had blue eyes” can mean such different things to different readers. Maybe I envision a child with bright eyes the color of the sky while another reader envisions a child with dark, royal blue eyes. The five-word description opens the door to endless possibilities of the imagination. Reading is an active form of entertainment and your mind must stay focused in order to truly understand what you are reading, so you are able to experience the story in a way that is sometimes not possible when using a more passive entertainment form such as television shows or movies.

I have read children’s books and young adult novels, poetry collections and classics, yet it never ceases to amaze me just how fascinating the written word is. How beautiful it is that an alphabet of 26 letters can be rearranged and strung together in millions of different ways to create not only thousands of words but also thousands of stories! Literature has been a part of human culture for centuries and I hope I have the opportunity for the rest of my life to embark on the imaginative journey of reading.