I have been collecting and actively reading books for the past seven years. Even though I love to read now it wasn't always that way. As a child my mother used to force me to go to a read-a-thon that lasted the entire summer at the library...EVERY SUMMER...and hated it. It wasn't until I was a freshman in high school that I started to like reading but rarely read. When I went to Italy in 2009 is when I started to actively read and collect books. Now a days I feel like I am read so much to try to make up for the lost time.