My freshman year at Brandeis, I fell into a bit of a “reading slump.” With so much required reading to do for class, it was hard to motivate myself to also read for pleasure. However, I had always loved reading (I was an English major for a reason), and I was sad that something I enjoyed had started feeling like an obligation. Determined to dig myself out of the hole, that January, I made it my New Year’s resolution to start reading a minimum of one page of a book a day (no, books for class absolutely did not count). If one page was all I read, I had at least gotten a page further than I had yesterday. Usually, however, that determination to just read one page was the push I needed to open up the book, and I almost always read more than just my promised page.

At the same time, I started writing book reviews for nearly every book I read in an effort to remember them better. I occasionally found myself writing lengthy reviews, mostly just for me. It wasn’t until Naomi that anyone else was really interested in them. Who is Naomi, you ask? If you’re reading this, I hope you already know. On the off chance that you don’t, Naomi is the illustrious editor of The Hoot arts section and my dear friend. She lovingly peer-pressured me into writing book reviews for The Hoot, telling me it would be just as easy as writing them for my Goodreads account. Surely enough, it was easy, and it was also fun. I had a place for my writing where people might actually read it (and by people, I mostly mean my family, The Hoot staff and some well-meaning Brandeis professors). Eventually, I wrote enough articles to officially become a staffer myself, an entirely unexpected but pleasant development.

Writing reviews felt a lot like my one-page-a-day resolution. I was pushing myself to do something I loved (in this case, talking about books) but giving myself a structured format to do it and giving the situation real stakes (in this case, disappointing Naomi). I was forced to start thinking even more deeply about what I was reading and organizing my thoughts in writing to make coherent arguments about literature, this time outside of an academic setting. I became a better writer for it, but I also enjoyed myself.

Now, my time at The Hoot is coming to an end, as this is the last edition being published before I graduate in a few weeks. I am so grateful that I played a small part in this newspaper. I never thought I would do something like this at Brandeis, and it has ended up being such a fulfilling part of my university experience. As I close out my tenure as an arts section staffer, I hope to encourage any readers who happen upon this article to take on the same challenges I did. If you find yourself struggling to read, start with just one page a day. If you want to up the ante, talk about those books once you finish them. Start a conversation with your friends, or, better yet, write a review. It is such a valuable experience to thoroughly think through your opinions on a book and all that you learned from it, and those lessons will stick with you all the more when you write them down. I truly will miss writing for The Hoot so much, but I know I will come back to this “review” of my time to remember all that I gained from it.

I am so honored that I got to be a part of this over the last two years.