In my first paper, I wrote about how, as a child, I would get invested in the fictional worlds of books and find myself thinking of the characters as friends of mine. As I grew up, the “real world” took over my consciousness, and I stopped getting lost in books the way I once did. As a college student, I feel like this is partially due to the sheer lack of time that I have to read and engage with books, but also because I didn’t come to each book looking to extract its themes and motifs, to pull apart the narrative rather than simply enjoying it. Back then, I didn’t approach each novel with an agenda.