Unless you’re a freshman completing a summer reading assignment, you probably don’t need to read anything this summer. Not on Twitter or Facebook, but really read. After a whole year of school, this might feel like a relief. No more papers, assignments, or forced slogging through dense texts that hold no interest to you. Freedom to finally get away from reading.

From the time we’re in elementary school, reading can start to seem like a task. Sure, learning our A-B-Cs wasn’t too hard, but then again, that learning was reinforced by coloring activities.

We read science textbooks, long, drawn-out math problems, and books that seemed the easiest to complete a report on the day before it was due. We had discussions in high school English classes on Shakespeare, entirely founded on what we’d read on SparkNotes the lunch period before.

Really, who can blame us? We didn’t just have homework, we had 10 assignments in each class. We didn’t just have assignments, we had sports, clubs, and college applications. Try balancing that all with a social life—or sleep for that matter. The days of reading things for pleasure faded into the days of reading things because we had to.

By the time we got to college, it was almost a non-question. “Read anything good lately?”

Well...no. (Who has time for that? I’ve been meaning to, but I just haven’t found the time between work and school and that final paper...) When you’re exhausted after a full day of being a student, no one can argue about the ease of logging into something instead of staring down a wall of text.

Sure, we still read. But is what we're reading challenging us, challenging our minds and our ideas and sometimes even our very beliefs? Probably not. But that's tiring. It's kind of a downer. It's hard to concentrate on that kind of thing with everything else we're expected to do on a day to day basis.

In short, it’s not a mystery why we don’t read. It’s hard to imagine a book that’s not a foot thick, with half the pages full of citations on a meaningless topic, a thousand sources of information on the dangerous lizards and insects of Indonesia. Sigh.

But hey, do you remember, back in elementary school, when you used to get the fliers for the Scholastic Book Fair? It was the best day of the year, walking into that room, the tables just covered with books. Even if you knew you couldn’t buy more than one, you could still fill out your wish list.

Or even the school’s library. What made us so excited to enter, to pick up a random book and just start flipping through the pages? What made us secretly agree with those cheesy posters that said reading could take us anywhere?

Maybe we haven’t really forgotten at all.

Reading is something akin to magic. Think about it. You’re staring at a page, a piece of paper or a tablet screen. Your eyes are scanning little black squiggles, symbols that on their own mean nothing. And yet—there goes your mind, weaving a story. You’re doing it right now, need I remind you. (No, I’m not actually saying anything to you, you’re just looking at a lot of little lines.)

Remember that one book, or that one series you used to love? Why did you love it so much?

We loved it because it had the ability to transport us. We could choose another storyline, another life, another place, and travel there, all while sitting in our bedrooms or our yard. We could be someone else for a while, do things that could never occur in our everyday lives, or even our universe. No commercials, no recording for later. It was all on our own time, and the characters looked how we imagined them to.

True, in the school year, we might not quite have had the time to truly slow down, to reconnect with what we love about picking up a book (or a kindle, or a reading application). Now, though, it’s summer.

A summer job can be boring. Time away from school, which seemed like such a dream at first, can devolve into listless hope for something to do, or late, late nights absorbing the mind-crushing programming of the dead hours of television. So, here’s an idea. A project, if you will.

Find a place. A quiet place, somewhere that you don’t mind being alone. And then read.

Let yourself be taken somewhere else, to be someone else, if only for a little while. Be alone, and yet, with a book, be surrounded.

Here’s our summer reading project, fellow students: choose a book. Something that interests you. And don’t worry about taking notes, completing worksheets, or tests on the material. Read because it’s fun, and it’s something you’ve been meaning to do. Read because you never know where it might take you or what you might learn until you do. And maybe the forgotten feeling of reading for leisure, just reading for the sake of reading, won’t be too far away after all.