Hello, and welcome back to some intermittent summer reflections about process. There’s been a lot going on here, so this installment is delayed — but also, isn’t “process” such a perpetually-relevant topic?
Following up from last time: writing, really, is about sitting your butt down in the chair and showing up. Writing is the patience and discipline to keep going, even when the current draft is still splashing around in some slimy underground cave somewhere. But writing is fueled by so much else, too.
For me, words and ideas can draw their flow and life from my wanderings outside. See my little ode to Thoreauvian woods here:
Yet words also spring from the things I read. In the last few years, I’ve mulled over the importance of preserving my love for reading itself — for all the places books can transport us to, if we let them.
Today’s reflections: Reading is Writing
When I was at the end of my PhD a few years ago, I read all the time — mostly the old books and cultural-history texts and ephemera that I was analyzing in my dissertation, plus all sorts of academic research articles and monographs and review essays. This reading was necessary for the kind of writing I was learning to do. It became a big part of my life during that period. But there was something missing.
I didn’t read much for fun anymore.
I’ve always been a public-library groupie, and during my final grad school years in Georgia I got a library card for the local branch in Decatur, a ten-minute walk down the street from the little apartment where I lived. I’d wander over there in the swampy summer heat (proof of my book-dedication) and pick up my holds, then trudge on home.
I could have gotten my pleasure-reading books from my university library, and sometimes I did, while also picking up all those academic-research tomes. But I’d noticed something by then: I liked to keep my “fun” reading separate. I liked to preserve some semblance of the feeling I’d had as a kid, when skipping into the public library summoned a familiar delight.
Each night before bed, I read at least a few pages of a book. This is a ritual I’ve had for my entire life, one that I find necessary to fall asleep.
Grad school was no different. But, during those years, I often found that I was very tired. My pre-bed reading felt obligatory. I flipped through a few pages, but I couldn’t always finish the books I picked up from the public library. I returned them before I’d gotten through them, once they were way overdue.
Reading for fun didn’t feel as appealing as it once had. I’d developed the academic habit of reading each book through an analytical lens, thinking about its structure and its literary inheritance and all sorts of things, including how I might be able to use it in my own arguments. I rarely aimed to enjoy the prose.
Enter post-grad-school life. Lots of things were changing. I yearned to get lost in a book again. (In my conversations with friends who’ve also been through grad school, I’ve discovered that many of them also know this feeling.)
Rediscovering pleasure reading, at least in part, also meant relearning how to loll around and “waste time,” aka surrender myself to the open expanses of a book rather than my own checklists.
I had a lot to unlearn, too, because along the way, reading had come to feel like a chore, even a mark of my academic seriousness, my capacity for critique. Sure, grad school gave me many skills I’m grateful for — distilling arguments and ideas, skimming, reading multiple things at once, seeing a text’s place in a wider tradition, drawing out its finer details as well as its larger relevance. But it also became all research and very little play.
As one of my old friends teased me for a few years: all my reading was “mercenary.” And so was I.
She was right. I knew it. And I missed the delight.
If I got nothing else out of my postdoc, I was determined to reclaim pleasure reading. I set aside stretches of time to flip through random books friends had recommended, including friends who have never ventured close to an English PhD. I found that the Boston Public Library system is awesome. I got a library card and walked my dog up to the little library on the corner several times each week.
I was starting to write some new stuff, too, and I had realized that I wouldn’t be able to do it without diving into a new style of my own. Without learning to sustain that style over many pages. Without uncovering my own innate playfulness. Simply put, I needed more examples of how to write as I wanted to write. I needed to whet my curiosity and swim around in words again.
I won’t list out “the books that helped me to read for fun again,” because that’s not the real point. The pleasure was still there. I just had to find ways to enjoy those books as ends in themselves, rather than only as objects of study. But here are a couple of scattered, whimsical titles that come to mind from the last few years. No One is Talking About This, by Patricia Lockwood. Crying in H Mart, by Michelle Zauner. Monsters, by Claire Dederer. Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson. Martyr!, by Kaveh Akbar. Matrix, by Lauren Groff. Stay True, by Hua Hsu. Heavy, by Kiese Laymon. Easy Beauty, by Chloe Cooper Jones. Gold Diggers, by Sanjena Sathian. This Here Flesh, by Cole Arthur Riley. The Secret to Superhuman Strength, by Alison Bechdel.
This list is a bit random, and I could add many more, but these are all books that I remember reading for hours. Many of them are contemporary. They cross genres. But perhaps most importantly, they have all figured into conversations I’ve had with other people. (I also admit to indulging in many good old “cultural-voyeurism-reads” or “hate-reads,” as another part of certain friend-conversations, but that’s a different topic for another day.)
Reading is writing. I’ve never been very into TV shows, so these days after dinner I often sit and read something I’ve picked up from the public library. It’s not about being “productive” — again, not the point — but about being transported into the different ways that other writers have found to express something. This never stops feeling like a small miracle to me.
Reading stimulates the writing-brain. Reading can become part of those wider conversations that never end. And reading shows me why I write to begin with. I’m so glad to be enjoying it again, as much as I am right now.
And my current read? As of this week, I’m finally getting to Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. This one is pulling me in.
So, readers, how do you preserve the space that true pleasure-reading can take? How do you make time for your own readerly stimulation and joy?