“Did you seriously bring a book to a party?” My friend said, rolling her eyes and laughing over the music and voices floating around us.

I shrugged my shoulders and clutched my rented copy of Gone Girl to my chest. It was one of many novels stacked in a neat pile on my bookshelf on loan from the university library. I had a part-time job there while I studied English which seemed like the perfect deal to me. I spent half of my day studying Shakespeare, taking creative writing classes, and writing essays, and the other half was dedicated to helping college kids with their research projects and being surrounded by one of my favorite things in the entire world: books.

Reading has always been a part of my life. As a kid I wouldn’t be able to sleep the night before the book fair came to school- I still don’t understand why we can’t have them as adults. Nothing sounds better to me than walking around a book fair with a cup of coffee-we definitely need to make that a thing.

As an adult, my love for reading has only gotten stronger. When life gets too much and the hustle and bustle of my life as a millennial has got me wanting to delete everything having to do with social media, I always have my books to fall back on. The stories are timeless, I can usually find a character to relate to, and the community of readers is where I’ve found so many lifelong friends.

I spent a lot of my life moving from city to city because of my dad’s job in the Navy. It was difficult making friends because of how often I changed schools. Books were something that has always been stable in my life. I could always find a library wherever I went and the books that I collected for my shelves stayed with me. As an adult, I channel that energy into everything I create. I think about a kid out there like myself who looks at books as a safe haven…and I want to make sure not only that they are encouraged to create things of their own- but also that there will always be a book for them to hold on to when they need it.