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I read trash. Or at least according to some people I do.

An article in Monday's issue of The Daily Pennsylvanian reported the plummeting rates of pleasure reading among college students. In it, one student said that "what college students typically read is not helpful at all to improving literacy rates anyway" and highlighted books such as the popular Twilight series as premiere examples of literary garbage.

But if it's between immersing myself in a rudimentary piece of literature or staring at the TV, I say bring on the trash.

In truth, it all hinges on your definition of literary worth. While many intellectuals snub the simplistic language of Harry Potter books (Dare I call them novels?), scholars in the field of creative writing might validate Rowling for her mastery of plot and character.

And though worldly individuals might perceive a newspaper as the most legitimate publication, I'm sure that classic authors like Jane Austen would gag at journalism's colloquial diction and negligent sentence structure.

The point is that it's all legitimate, and it's all better than TV. Anne Cunningham, associate professor of Cognition and Development at the University of California, lists the benefits of reading in her paper "What Reading Does for the Mind." She explained that reading expands vocabulary and general knowledge, and most importantly, it sharpens our capacity for memory and reasoning, which unfortunately dwindles with age.

I love TV, and I respect the craft of television writing as an art form (particularly on Showtime).

Still, it's the effect of consistently choosing TV over reading that plagues me. Between recording lectures on our laptops, checking e-mail, perusing Facebook and reading articles online, we're practically inside our computers. So when that leisure time finally comes around, it's important to ignore the somewhat bizarre inclination to stare at a screen. Pick up a magazine or book and just read. Touch the paper, feel the paper, love the paper.

Monday's article associated the absence of non-academic reading with an overload of required reading in college. But many majors aren't reading-based. I spoke with Creative Writing professor Lynn Levin who said, "If you're not already immersed [in class readings], I think it would be delightful to read for pleasure."

But even beyond the dichotomy of humanities versus science majors, reading for pleasure gives us the opportunity to enjoy something purely for its merit, rather than for our success in articulating its merit to a professor.

In fact, studies show that low-literacy children learned to associate reading with exams so early in life that they instinctively reject reading in its entirety.

At Penn, we live in a rich academic environment laden with creativity and the optimal mindset to enjoy reading. Unfortunately, many intellectually-minded students can't deal with the intangible but weighty pressure to read recreationally. And as psychological patterns go, they consequently choose not to read.

Engineering sophomore Amanda King brought this phenomenon to my attention: "You only get from reading what you put into it."

If you're reading because you think you should be reading, then you won't benefit much.

But that pressure comes from societal determination of what's worth reading. Without those expectations, we would be much more likely to choose books over TV.

Find something you do like to read, and don't be intimidated if people consider it trash. Better yet, throw them in the trash, and then continue reading.

Dani Wexler is a College sophomore from Los Angeles. Her e-mail is wexler@dailypennsylvanian.com. Wex Appeal appears every Friday.

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