On my way to the APA conference last week, I had a layover in Detroit that was extended a couple of hours by bad weather. Like most people in my line of work, I did (of course) have a couple of books with me, both of them related to my current research, and I had the files of several candidates who we would be interviewing at the conference. Needless to say, neither of those things seemed very much like “relaxing” airport reading at the time. So, I wandered over to one of the bookstores and browsed around until I found a novel that looked interesting (Gods Behaving Badly by Marie Phillips), then parked myself to read. By the time I got to Philadelphia, I was more than three-quarters of the way through the novel… and for about a half-second, I wondered to myself: why can’t I read that fast all the time?
Now, there are obvious answers to that question, the first of which is that the novel was “easy” reading. But my guess is that the real answer is rather that the novel went faster because it was “pleasurable” reading. For better or worse, the other reading material that I had with me at the airport in Detroit was “work” reading. That doesn’t mean that it wasn’t also, in its own way, pleasurable to read, but only that it fell into a different subconscious category of things-that-I-am-compelled-to-do. (Incidentally, this is one of the drawbacks of becoming a professional philosopher, in my view. That is, what used to be “pleasure” reading becomes “work” reading. It doesn’t cease being pleasurable, but now it has to fight that uphill battle against the ought. Like broccoli, which is delicious, but obligatory.) I suppose its always been the case that I read faster the things I choose to read, but I really have noticed this past semester that my non-leisure reading seems to be slowing down.
Throughout graduate school, I was always reading a piece of non-obligatory fiction or nonfiction in addition to whatever I was reading for my studies/work. My reasoning behind this was that it was a healthy habit to cultivate, to constantly remind myself that reading really is pleasurable for me, but also because it was a particulary effective way of keeping my Anecdote Arsenal (aka, Cocktail Conversation Depot) well-stocked and up-to-date. My old grad school roommate and friend, Trott, and I used to trade non-work books all the time, and we were often reading the same novel at the same time. I don’t know when I let that practice slide, but it’s something that I need to begin again.
So, consider this an open invitation for reading suggestions. If you want to get a sense of what I like to read, you can check out the earlier reading-related posts on this blog here, here, and here. Also, please tell me why you’re suggesting whatever book you’re suggesting, instead of just sending a title. Thanks in advance!
6 comments on “Pleasure Reading”
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Great, great post! Just recently I realized that I had completely given up on pleasure reading. I thought about it really hard and traced the beginning of the end to my first semester of graduate school (August 2004).
I was starting in political theory, coming from a political science undergraduate program that was vastly non-theoretical. So I had a lot of catching up to do. I read a lot, but all of it was done with a pen in my hand, i.e. work related.
I blame my obsession with all things blog-related to my two years in graduate school. The blogs I read and love are personal, uncomplicated, dealing with the simple falls and triumphs of everyday life: the opposite of what my work seemed to be about at the time.
Now that blogging has started becoming a part of my professional life, I find myself looking for ways to escape from it and going back to reading for pleasure has been fantastic for me.
The book that put me back on track was Curtis Sittenfeld’s PREP.
This is a good reminder about something I’ve been meaning to tell you! The book that I loved and thought you’d like too was O’Neill’s Netherland. The two things that made this novel a fast (pleasurable) read for me were the great, rarely used words and the fascinating factual details that were woven into the story. Let me known what you think when you get to it!
I cannot believe you are trafficking in such uncritical terms as “pleasurable” reading. Scandalized.
What I want to know is why certain texts, imbued with a maximum of simplicity, are incredibly hard to read. I find myself reading them aloud to keep myself from being distracted. In other words, student papers. They are becoming impenetrable, I am finding.
The most gratifying book that I have read recently is “The Loser” by Thomas Bernhard. I think I posted on Facebook about this, but despite the fact that it started out slow and I was like, where is this going, at a certain, I was captivated.
WHen I was in Oxford a few months ago (hrumph), I was reading this children’s book called “The Adventures of Captain Underpants.” This particular episode involved toilets that had teeth, where you might imagine them, and chased around people. It was fascinating. Although you yankees may have trouble finding these volumes …
Wait, I thought the point of being a philosopher was that you could read whatever the hell you wanted and call it related to your work! (I’m pretty sure that Lewis Gordon said something to this effect when he spoke at VU’s grad conference), and I’ve taken him at his word.
I liked Prep a lot also — although it came too painfully close to reminding me why high school was so miserable (although I’ve heard that Sittenfeld has written a book that has a Laura Bush-esque character as a sympathetic closet democrat — and I have long made a point of hating Laura Bush almost as much as the man she co-dependently enables).
Four other good books I’ve read recently and that I think you’d like:
1) On Beauty (Zadie Smith) — (I think I posted about this one on Chet’s blog). I think it portrays academic characters more faithfully than most books — although their lives still do seem to have more sex and classier parties than any academics I know . . . The author also just had an interesting piece in the New Yorker about her father and brother that reminded me of the book. Oh, and one of the main characters is an aesthetician, so it must be good.
2)Lost City Radio (Daniel Alarcon) — I knew the author of this book when we were both teenagers and then lost touch with him. I knew from mutual friends (and from a story of his that I’d read in the New Yorker) that he had become a writer, but I was surprised one day to hear the book reviewer on All Things Considered (or was it Maureen Corrigan on Fresh Air?) giving it a glowing review.
Ten years after her husband has “disappeared” during a civil war in an unnamed Latin-American country, the main character is the host of a popular radio show called “Lost City Radio,” where people try to find people they’ve lost touch with — the plot of the book concerns one such boy whose story touches closely on her husbands.
3) Special Topics in Calamity Physics (Marisha Peissl). For the first twenty or thirty pages I didn’t think I was going to like this book, because I thought it was going to be too Umberto Eco-esque (an author about whom I am deeply ambivalent). But I was wrong in both the comparison and my assessment. A truly fantastic, genre-defying book. If anything, it might have been the coming-of-age novel that Eco might have written if he were our age and had more of a sense of humor, but even that doesn’t do justice to the book.
4)Incredibly Loud and Extremely Close (or Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close?) (Jonathan Safran Foer) — I liked Everything is Illuminated a lot (even more after learning the answer to a debate Ideas Woman, Esq. and I had been having about whether or not he had made up the entire pre-history and story of the village — he had). But I thought I.L.E.C. (or E.L.I.C.? was even better). The only 9/11 novel that I can think of which succeeds in being moving, because it isn’t pathos laden.
Ideas Man:
I have read a lot of the books you mention in your comment. We should talk “pleasure reading” more!!!
I got PREP from Chet who had read and liked it. Then I read Sittenfeld’s American Wife, found it fascinating and passed it back on to him. You should check it out. It’s a very interesting… although I still find it hard to say I *liked* it.
By the way, Zadie Smith wrote a review of Netherland for the New York Review of Books. It was published in the Nov 20 issue, let me know if you can’t find it and I will email it to you.
Yeah, I’m glad that Dr. J. occasionally posts on reading, since I often want to (but never actually do) — I am, however, a huge fan of goodreads.
And I probably shouldn’t hold the Laura Bush thing against Sittenfeld. I just really hate Laura Bush.