It is early August. You feel the cool ocean breeze as you splash through the waves. You head back to your towel and lift your sunglasses to look at the time, realizing it’s almost 5 p.m. You have been in the water all day.

For high school students, this is how summer should be spent.

This summer, PV introduced a summer reading book for each grade level, most likely in the hopes of inspiring students to read over the break and attempting to spark creative classroom discussions during the first week of school.

Assigned summer reading is limiting the opportunity to read the varieties of books students are passionate about.

Having the school assign what students must read over the summer is unfair. Reading should be an enjoyable experience, not a chore.

For some students, reading the book required for their grade level was not a time-consuming challenge. However, many teachers assigned books for their own classes in addition to the mandatory grade-level assignment. Depending on their class schedules, some students could have had as many as three or four assigned summer reading books.

In that case, it is hard to find time to read the books that do interest us.

Currently, I am taking AP English Language and Composition. Besides a short activity to ensure that we read the book, we have not discussed Hillbilly Elegy as a class at all. That leaves me to wonder: What was the point of reading this book if it will not be used for classroom discussions?

It was disappointing to learn that my time and effort had been focused on a book that was barely covered in class. That time could have been used to read history, fantasy, and mystery stories — books I am actually interested in — that are sitting on my desk, waiting to be dusted off and opened.

Harris Cooper, chairman of the department of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University, spoke about the amount of summer work students receive in an editorial for The New York Times.

“[Summer reading] also shouldn’t be so overwhelming it crowds out the other activities that make summer special,” Cooper said. “Resentment is not conducive to learning.”

Assigned summer books can cause students to resent reading and become uninterested in books, specifically course texts.

Students like me were more interested in the number of pages they had left than the book’s message.