I was never the biggest bookworm growing up and it was not often you would find my head shoved into a million pages of text, unaware of my surroundings and the outside world, diluted to what the plot of my latest novel was. Nope, I was never a bookworm. I eventually found comfort in books, however, and I would say most could agree the same thing has happened to them.

More often than not, the large textbook, billions of words long, with a rare graphic or photo thrown in, becomes nothing but jumble. It is then that I find a bit of solace in something other than the explanations behind the criminal justice system or the history of investigative journalism. It is not that those do not interest me, but when boredom strikes they are not the first books that come to mind. What they can lack in emotional essence they spare greatly against with knowledge, but nothing compares to the winding road you go down when a book catches your soul.

Novels unrelated to class became a great journey, an absolute getaway. Mason Cooley, a professor emeritus at the College of Staten Island, once said, “Reading gives us some place to go when we have to stay where we are.”

His words never held more truth.

When the stresses of college seem to riddle our brain the best thing could be taking some time to unwind and revel in that novel you started before break ended.

With all the reading we do already it is sometimes hard to imagine grabbing a book and reading it without the sudden urge to fall asleep or just plain faceplant into it. It is possible though to find one you love so much that every time you open to the page you left off you are transported to another realm altogether. This is what books are meant to do.

Some are the academia kind and there to provide a rush of knowledge and others are meant to take you on a great travel. From the classics of “Moby Dick” and “To Kill a Mockingbird” to lesser known books, each has something to offer to the reader. It is the great books though that truly whisk our hearts and minds to another dimension. It is hard to find these books sometimes, but when you do they can be the ones to change your perspective on things like life and love.

As cliché as some of this can sound, books are truly meant to make you think, inspire you and change you. If you read, you learn and if you learn, in most cases, you end up teaching. So when you are not reading that sometimes stuffy old book on psychological theories open a new chapter in your life and pick up a novel. Find something that interests you and that makes you wonder what will happen to a character. Grab the book, a blanket and find the coziest place and just let your mind escape for a little while.