It is the first week of classes at Colorado State University. The week where you receive syllabi, look for friends in classes, groan over assignments due in the first week and look over the reading that needs to be done. I am a Journalism major and an English minor and so I have to do a lot of reading. Not that I mind really, I run a book blog, I like to read. However, reading for school always seems to be the last thing I want to do. Maybe it is the stigma associated with homework, or maybe I just want to read Harry Potter and The Order of The Phoenix for the fourth time, who knows really? Regardless, every semester I promise myself things are going to be different.

“I will do all of the reading this semester!” I say confidently.

“I will do all of the reading on time!” I add for emphasis.

Every semester ends up being the same though, and something falls to the wayside. Not everything though just so we’re clear, I still do the majority of the assigned reading. In honor of the first week of classes and a brand new semester and school year, I decided to look back on some of the assigned reading I never did.

The Good Earth- Pearl S. Buck 

Second semester of my freshman year of high school we had to read this book in my history class. I read about fifty pages of the book before deciding that there were too many episodes of Gilmore Girls that needed to be watched, and simply not enough time to keep reading. I, of course, had to do a project on the book so I skimmed enough to finish the project and ended up getting a B.

A Prayer for Owen Meany- John Irving

The summer before my sophomore year of high school we were supposed to read this book for English. The letter that I got in the mail said it needed to be finished by the first day of school. Now, my mom was an english teacher and she had read this book before. “Don’t do it. It’s boring.” She said to me after reading the letter. She ended up printing off the spark notes for me and I read those instead. We never talked about the book in class.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn- Mark Twain

I had to read this book for my english class senior year of high school. This was a book that I actually wanted to read, and was looking forward to. The teacher and I did not see eye to eye though and she put incredibly dramatic emphasis on the fact that we could not do well on our IB exam if we didn’t read this book at least twice. All I heard from her was “I challenge you to do well and not read the text!” So that is what I did. The anxiety I had the night before the exam wondering if I had made a horrible mistake was pretty bad, but my score on the exam was pretty good. Great even. And the look on my teacher’s face when I told her I wrote about Huck Finn was priceless.

The textbook for the advertising class I took during the Fall ’11 semester

It was really heavy and I didn’t feel like lugging it around everywhere. I decided to see if I could just take notes in class and watch Mad Men on Netflix. Surprisingly it helped more than I thought it would, although I probably should have done the textbook readings to prepare for the exams. I would, however, like to give a big shout out to my man Don Draper and say thanks.

Feed- MT Anderson

This one is tricky because I have read this book, I just didn’t read it when it was assigned in my adolescent literature class last spring semester (sorry Todd!) I didn’t really like it the first time I read it, so I didn’t want to read it again. It is a book that I would like to revisit now that I am older (I read it for the first time when I was 16) but on my own time, not for homework. Also in my defense I had to read over twenty books for that one class and that was the last one and I just wasn’t feeling it anymore.

Now go forth an read! Or, well, not.