It took me ages to get back into reading for pleasure after I finished the PhD. In a way it was as if I’d forgotten how. I found reading anything slow going, no matter how long or difficult it was.
There were a couple of ways that I got my social reading mojo back.
One was to start reading things that couldn’t even be thought of in the same breath (to mix a metaphor) as my research interests. I started reading things that were more in line with my recreational interests. So, biographies and histories in music and sport were a good starting place – things where I “knew the story”, which helped me to turn down the dial on my analytical faculties.
I’ve read some great books in this line recently – Cosey Fanni Tutti’s Art Sex Music, telling the fraught story of Throbbing Gristle and her own performance art career; Carrie Brownstein’s Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, taking us through the Sleater-Kinney years to Portlandia; and Bob Stanley’s Yeah Yeah Yeah, a compendious history of pop music in the widest sense.
The other, which I really had to make a conscious effort at, was to make myself read faster. Reading things for work I’m always trying to be conscious of the language used, even if I like my first pass to be fairly quick. It is, after all, what forms the basis of literary-critical work.
But reading for pleasure I don’t need to do that. Sure, I notice particularly elegant or striking turns of phrase. But I don’t need to be earmarking phrases and sections for later discussion.
I really got back into reading a lot when I was essentially out of academia. It was seven years between me finishing my PhD and getting my Napier job, my first permanent one. The final year before that I felt very little connected to academia (I’ll write more about the academic hinterland another time). But it meant that I read a lot – reading’s something that I’ve always had to do, one way or another.
My biggest read in that time was all twelve volumes of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, which I very much enjoyed over the course of about 18 months. I do like a long read – I’m secretary to the Ford Madox Ford Society, and have written quite a bit about Parade’s End; I also have an enduring affection for George Eliot’s Middlemarch having taught it for many years at Manchester.
I’ve started to try and slacken the boundaries between pleasure and work reading in the interests of broadening my frame of reference. As a good modernist, my project this year is to get started on Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. I’ve been talking about this with my brilliant modernist colleague Tara Thomson since I got to Napier. She is much better than me and has made a start. I’ve now bought the first couple of volumes in the Vintage edition and am determined to get going.
Anyone want to read along and hold me accountable? Any Edinburghers / Scottish modernists / interested folks want to join us, perhaps in the pub, to talk about it?
Academics Are People Too 