You’ve seen the posters, the posters that exclaim, “Read!” next to a hotshot celebrity ranging from Orlando Bloom to Serena Williams, in an effort to persuade young people to pick up a book.

Yet leisure reading seems like a luxury, since many college students can’t fit it into their schedules.

Even with classes, work, extracurricular activities and social events taking up daily life, a 15-minute ride on CyRide or a half-hour break before a class starts, are great opportunities to start one’s personal reading list.

Since the Parks Library is mainly an academic library for research purposes, a better bet for students who want a broader selection of leisure reading would be the Ames Public Library, located on 515 Douglas Ave.

Lora Van Marel, assistant in Youth Services at Ames Public Library and graduate student in library science at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, said very few ISU students actually have a public library card, a service which is free to the whole student body.

“A lot of college students don’t know [the library] is here, or they’re just so consumed with campus that they don’t get time to come over here unless they have to for classes,” Van Marel said.

Despite a lack of a wide variety of leisure offerings, the Parks Library still encourages students to read on their own by keeping new releases on hold in the leisure collection in the Fireplace Room. “Subject specialists” make the decision as to what is considered leisure reading.

“We have a broad readership, including faculty, graduate and undergraduate students, staff, community members and other students, that we have to keep in mind,” said Ed Goedeken, professor and collections coordinator at Parks Library. “It’s really hard to know what students are reading, so we ask ourselves what would be of current interests to our readers.”

Since college students tend to find scientific subjects “boring” for leisure reading, much of the leisure collection is tilted toward social science and humanities, with subjects ranging from the war in Iraq to the presidential election. In addition, a growing section in the Fireplace Room is devoted to cookbooks.

Other types of genre popular among college students are young adult literature, New York Times bestsellers and popular fiction that inspire movie remakes, such as the “skyrocketing” Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer, to be released in theaters next weekend, Van Marel said.

She also cited graphic novel reading as an emerging trend in popular literature for college students who don’t have much time to read for leisure.

“A lot of people think of them just as big comic books, which is what they are, except that you can read them really, really fast,” Van Marel said.

Other services offered by both libraries that encourage student leisure reading are interlibrary loans, hold requests, popular fiction, books on CD, downloadable e-books, as well as order requests.

“I would think that college kids have so much reading they have to do, that their opportunities for leisure reading probably are not as extensive as they would be when they were younger,” Goedeken said. “But we’ll try and encourage it as much as we can. If someone wants us to buy something — we’ll buy it.”