I went to Trinity College in Dublin yesterday, photographer Sally Mann’s Virginia farm the day before that, and every night before I go to sleep, I take a quick jaunt through the endless halls of Hogwarts—which is, needless to say, tucked away somewhere in the United Kingdom.

Being that I am trapped in a quiet house in a boring town—given, the town I live in was already boring, but it’s a fact that has been made even more apparent to me on account of quarantine—I have given my mind a chance to go anywhere and everywhere, feel anything and everything by voraciously devouring all of the books I have been longing to read for months now. It has been difficult for me in recent years to schedule time to read for pleasure having been caught up in the seemingly never-ending whirlwind of scholarly articles and assigned reading lists for four years. But now more than ever, reading for me is much more than a hobby or a way to kill time, it is a necessity. There is so much comfort to be found in a good book, and there are so many unbelievable places you can “go” without leaving your home. And being gripped at least once a day by the fear an uncertain future as a soon to be graduate, I have found some much needed solace, mental clarity and perspective in the pages of some incredible reads.

I have also come to realize that one of the most comforting things about books is that they don’t change. If you stop reading a page on Monday and open up to that same spot on Sunday, the words on that page are exactly the same, the characters and setting exactly where you left them; which I suppose is what Charles W. Elliot meant when he referred to books as our “most constant of friends.” With the world changing every day and not knowing what my life will look like a year from now, I find it incredibly comforting to know for a fact that when I hop into bed tonight and crack open “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,” Harry will be exactly where I last left him, dashing out of Mr. Weasley’s cramped office in order to make it to his Ministry hearing in old courtroom 10. So, I urge you: go light a candle, put on some ridiculously fluffy socks and just get lost for a few minutes or, even a few hours, in a book.