When I was a kid, I was always known as the girl who had her nose in a book. I liked to read all kinds of things, but my favorite books were always fantasy fiction, like Harry Potter and other series like it. Even though I’m now a college student and I read textbooks more than anything else, I still love reading novels.

As a young adolescent, I wasn’t the talkative extrovert I am today. When I was about to turn nine and enter the fourth grade, my family moved from New Jersey to Virginia. I found it hard to make friends in a new place, as many kids do, and I ended up finding my escape in reading. Books allowed me to find places where I didn’t have to be myself, the new kid who hadn’t made any friends yet, and places where I could identify with the characters.

Now, it’s more than ten years later, and looking back on it I’m so glad that I had that experience. In a more logical sense, my avid reading habit expanded my vocabulary and gave me exposure to experiences and ideas that may have taken me much longer to understand when I encountered them in real life if I hadn’t read about them. The practice has allowed me to read books in college more quickly and to understand and analyze them more easily, and I even think that it helped me on my SATs. More importantly though, reading helped to shape my personality; it helped me to be more imaginative, gave me a somewhat wry sense of humor, and even made me a bit of a know-it-all.

These days, I see reading more as a way to learn new things, which might be a function of reading for classes all the time, but also may be because of the books I like to read as an adult. While this has not always been the case, and there may have been some things that I learned from the books I read as a kid that weren’t necessarily true or valuable, I still think that the experience has changed the course of my life for the better. Reading has been such a positive influence in my life I would recommend it to anyone. It’s never too late, and it’s not at all hard to start. In fact, it’s even easier now than it ever has been, with the internet and smartphones and Kindle devices. My advice is to explore the world of literature and find what you like, because reading not only has all the benefits that I reaped, but also creates a kind of spark within a person, and I would wish that spark on anyone and everyone. Reading makes us better, I firmly believe that.