As Thursday afternoon rolls around and there is the inevitable three-hour break between classes, what do you do – crawl back under the covers? Maybe cram in some last-minute homework? Or settle in with a book and read?

For some time now, college students’ views on reading for pleasure have been divided. However, as a new string of best-sellers have hit bookstore shelves, a gray area has formed between formerly black and white stances concerning pleasure reading.

“College isn’t usually a popular time for pleasure reading – students’ rooms are already piled with heavy tomes on subjects like tax law or microbiology,” an April 2002 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education said about student reading habits.

The majority of American children learn to read at a very early age. Some parents even read to their kids before they are born. Whatever the individual upbringing may be, it is common practice for families to introduce their child to reading as soon as possible. Bedtime stories, visits to the library and summer reading all start children on the path to reading for enjoyment. But as kids grow older, their love for reading often wanes.

“We are sick of reading books. When I’m done with my homework, there’s no time to pleasure read,” said Olga Tarasova, sophomore in LAS.

Whether students view it as a chore, an undesirable attempt at relaxation or a waste of time, reading as a form of entertainment has gone by the wayside on college campuses.

The college pleasure reader is hard to find. However, in lieu of current book popularity, numbers are starting to grow. With recent mainstream hits like The DaVinci Code, Angels and Demons, and even the Harry Potter series, students are slowly starting to put down the remote and open up a book.

Joyce Wright, head of the Undergraduate library, has worked in the library system for 20 years and has no doubt today’s students are reading for pleasure.

“Even though students have their assignments, they do find time to pleasure read,” Wright said, and students are doing just that.

“I do my pleasure reading instead of my school reading,” Blake Nystrom, sophomore in business, said. “I just finished a book this week.”

With the growing popularity of book reading, there seems to be light at the end of the tunnel for a once-endangered leisure activity. Along with DaVinci Code-like hits, authors seem to have also taken heed from the American public and jumped on the pop-culture bandwagon. Reality genre books like The Pledge and He’s Just Not That Into You have leapt from the TV screen onto the written page from the concept of reality television.

Wright also observed that mainstream books like those on the New York Times bestseller list seem to be most popular among students.

“Students read a lot of the books that are trendy,” Wright said.

Even Hollywood has been riding and profiting from the book craze. Churning out novel based movies like butter over the past few years has sent students back to the bookstore. Movies, such as Polar Express, The Notebook, Bourne Identity, Lord of the Rings, and Christmas with the Cranks were all books.

The trend of adapting screenplays from novels is showing the originality and imagination that still lives in the written world and students have slowly started to pick up on that.

“If students have the time, you can find them curled up with a book,” Wright said.