What would you do with 3,228 minutes?

La Quinta Middle School eighth-grader Brenda Barriga decided to use the time to crack open a favorite book.

Brenda is the top winner of the first Indian Wells Rotary Club Literacy Drive, reading an average of seven hours a day.

Her secret was reading during lunch breaks, while waiting for her sister to finish soccer practice and every night before going to bed.

Brenda received $800 for her school and a gift certificate for the Westfield Barnes & Noble bookstore.

“I was actually really surprised,” Brenda said. “I was up against a lot of other people.”

She attributes part of her stick-to-it attitude during the drive to her Language Arts teacher Robin Merritt — plus it helped that she picked a book that she liked: “Breaking Dawn,” the final novel of the “Twilight” series by Stephanie Meyer.

“I just think the stories they tell — I love reading them and imagining it in my head,” Brenda said.

Her mother Grace Lizarraga said she is proud of her daughter's achievement, but isn't surprised.

“She must like what she's reading in order for her to read, and then she'll keep reading and reading and reading,” Lizarraga said, laughing.

Brenda was one of more than 200 students from five Coachella Valley middle schools — Bobby Duke, Indio, La Quinta, Thomas Jefferson and Toro Canyon middle schools — that participated in the weeklong competition that ran from Oct. 2 to Oct. 9, said David V. Humphrey Jr., the club's vocational service chairman.

The literacy drive, which Humphrey hopes becomes an annual event, is part of the club's vocational service project.

“It just came about naturally,” he said. “As a club, we put a big focus on education and to keep with that theme, we decided to go with reading.”

Students from each school were competing to read the most minutes in the week.

“The reason we chose that way was because we wanted a wide range of students to have a good chance, not just the honor students,” he said. “So students that couldn't read quickly could compete because they could read for an extended period of time.”

The students kept track of their minutes and had their parent or guardian sign off their literacy drive form to “testify for the minutes read,” Humphrey said.

All the top students from each school received a gift certificate from the Westfield Palm Desert Barnes & Nobles.

Second-place winner Ashton Shoemaker of Thomas Jefferson Middle School earned $500 for his school, and third-place winner Tito Ayon of Indio Middle School earned $200 for his school.

The Indian Wells Rotary Club will present Brenda, Ashton and Tito with the checks for their schools at a luncheon Monday at the Indian Wells Country Club.

“The goal was very simple: We just wanted children to do extracurricular reading,” Humphrey said. “Even if a student did an extra 20 minutes, it would be a better alternative than watching TV.”