For many college and high school students, December is crunch time. However, whether you are studying for finals or finishing up those last few admissions essays, you still need some time to relax and recharge. To help you with this, we're sharing some of our favorite fun (and educational!) websites and games.

The Best 100 Opening Lines from Books:  As many an English and composition teacher has told us, a strong opening is important when writing. To help you get inspired while writing your final papers, check out Stylist Magazine's compilation of great literary opening lines.

Imagination (A Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Tour of the Universe): Callum Sutherland, who is a true Carl Sagan fan, reworked Sagan's Cosmos as a choose-your-own-adventure style series of videos on YouTube.

HowStuffWorks?: From culture and entertainment to science and technology, How Stuff Works specializes in being a source of "credible, unbiased, and easy-to-understand explanations of how the world actually works." In addition to the website, there are also a number of official podcasts, including Stuff You Should Know and Stuff You Missed in History Class.

Snowdays by Popular Front: Get in touch with your inner artist (or 5-year-old) by creating virtual snowflakes with this fun, interactive site.

Sugar, Sugar: While the objective to this game (guide the falling sugar into the cup) sounds simple, you have to use your logic and reasoning skills to make it past all 30 levels.

With so much emphasis in our culture on college admissions, more and more titles on a variety of related topics are published each year. Here are a few books that are worth a second look.

The Parents We Mean to Be by Harvard's Richard Weissbourd cautions that we are doing our children a disservice by driving them toward achievement at all costs. Most worrisome is that the quest for personal fulfillment has replaced an emphasis on helping children build empathy. Parents increasingly seek to be their children's friends rather than their adult role models. He touches on how the college admissions frenzy fits into this dynamic and does so with a helpful, non-judgmental tone.

If you have ever wondered why the boy next door with the nearly A average in all honors and advanced placement classes and the close to perfect SAT scores didn't get into the college of his choice, you might want to read The Price of Admission, How America's Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges and Who Gets Left Outside the Gate by Daniel Golden. Golden is a former Wall St. Journal reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize for his series of articles on which the book is based.

Marjorie Savage directs the parent-liaison program at the University of Minnesota. Her book, You're On Your Own (But I'm Here If You Need Me): Mentoring Your Child During the College Years provides advice to parents about letting go and how to respect a child's independence while still providing support.

Considering a gap year? Taking Time Off: Inspiring Stories of Students Who Enjoyed Successful Breaks from College and How You Can Plan Your Own by Colin Hall and Ron Lieber profiles dozens of young people's experiences working, studying and performing community service in the USA and abroad.

In addition to the usual end-of-the-semester rush involving final exams and projects, many of us still have to face the daunting task of holiday shopping. To help you with this, here are some of the best books we have read this year.

Meta Maus: Art Spiegelman revisits his Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel in this work that is part scrapbook and part behind-the-scenes commentary. Click on the video below to see the book trailer.

MetaMaus by Art Spiegelman (book trailer)

Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN: James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales take an insider's look at what happens behind the cameras at ESPN.

Just My Type: A Book About Fonts: Type surrounds us, and Simon Garfield's approachable work encourages us to think about font and what its design can tell us.

Look, I Made a Hat: Stephen Sondheim's second compilation of lyrics from his shows starts with Sunday in the Park with George and follows his career to the present day. It is a veritable master class in musical theatre.

Help! For Writers: 210 Solutions to the Problems Every Writer Faces: Roy Peter Clark offers advice for writers to help you from the first draft to the finished product.

Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime: Journalists John Hellemann and Mark Halperin provide a riveting inside look into what really happened during the 2008 presidential campaign. Brilliant strategies, missteps and pure gossip make this a fascinating read.

Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption: Laura Hillenbrand tells the story of Louis Zamperini, a troubled youth who broke into houses and engaged in street brawls until he discovered his talent as a runner. The story takes us to the Pacific ocean where Zamperini is an Army Air Force bombadier during World War II. This is a story about how a man finds his humanity in the face of brutality and evil. You won't be able to put this book down.