Guest Columnist | A passion for reading, slowly destroyed

It was 9:00 on one of the last nights of finals week. I patted myself on the back for managing to get a seat among the crowd of Penn students cramming at the Bucks County cafe on the corner 40th and Locust streets, and I settled in for a few hours of reviewing for my last final of the semester, a cumulative exam for one of my English classes.

As my laptop fired up, I gazed resignedly at the stack of 18th-century novels in front of me.

"Of these dozen or so texts, how many did I ever finish?" I asked myself. The answer, I realized with a pang of guilt, was four: three from the beginning of the semester, when my workload was optimistically lighter, and one I had to do a presentation on the week after spring break.

When my study buddy arrived, he admitted to the same crime.

The situation was discouraging, but by no means a crisis. In fact, it happens to most students every semester. A tough week arrives and we push reading for one or more classes to the back burner while we address more-pressing matters. The unread pages accumulate, and an hour - or even an afternoon - devoted to catching up hardly seems to make a dent.

Nonetheless, Study Buddy and I felt pretty good after a few hours of reviewing all of our texts for our final, and we both did well on the exam.

And maybe that's why I am so bothered now.

I recall staring at this stack of novels - some of them the pinnacles of their genre - and resenting having to read them.

I have loved to read for as long as I can remember. While most kids in my grade school groaned as they stuffed their neon-colored summer reading lists in their backpacks on the last day of school, I treasured mine and looked forward to checking off titles like Shiloh or The Giver off the list.

As I grew older, I enjoyed curling up in my comfy bedroom chair with a cup of coffee or tea and losing myself in a novel. I enjoyed the escape that they offered or the wisdom that they passed on.

But until my first full week home on summer break, when I lapped up Paul Coelho's The Alchemist from cover to cover, I had not read a single book independently for almost nine months.

That is to say, I hadn't read a single book during the school year and really enjoyed it.

So I'm faced with the following question: Is college destroying one of my favorite pastimes?

Now, when I say "college," I am not only referring to professors who assign a book a week - professors I applaud, by the way, for their extreme naivete or extreme guts - but the lifestyles of college students. We go to class; we immerse ourselves in extracurricular activities; we lie out on College Green on the sunny days after a long, cold winter; we socialize; and we study. Before you know it, a semester, even a school year, has flown by.

However, it's not only the collegiate time crunch that keeps me from my hobby.

When it comes down to it, if I really wanted to, I could set aside time to sit and read for a couple hours during the weekend and not be worse off for it.

But I don't want to read during the school year; at least, not any more than I have to. I don't even have the mental energy to get all my assigned reading done.

How sad.

So here's the compromise I propose: I'll accept shelving my great hobby and keeping my nose in the textbooks during the school year, as long as Penn's administration takes a moment to consider embracing the old adage, "quality over quantity."

By overloading students with assigned reading, professors risk having a classroom of students who read just enough to get by in class discussions or exams. Their students may receive decent grades, but they leave the classroom with relief, rather than with an education.

Students should be able to appreciate learning as an intellectual activity and not see it as a chore.

So over the summer months, I would ask that professors drawing up their plans for the fall semester take a moment and reconsider their syllabi.

I, in the meantime, am drawing up a summer reading list for myself.

Maybe I'll even find some neon paper to print it on.

Anne Dobson is a College senior from Seattle, Wash. and is assignments editor of 'The Daily Pennsylvanian.' Her e-mail address is adobson@sas.upenn.edu.

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