Preparing for this article, I found myself re-reading a passage from Proust’s Swann’s Way. The narrator, first encountering a favourite novel, observed that the prose gave him joy “in some innermost chamber of [his] soul.” I put the book down and hastily underlined it. For a moment, the soft quartet of beauty reflected back from the page.
Reading for its own pleasure as a student during the semester is one of the most wonderful things you can do. The teetering pile of assigned work hangs miasmically. Choosing to rustle unrelated pages instead is a chance to claw back some vague autonomy from the capsizing sailboat of life.
By this point of the semester, I’m normally trying to get in control of my reading list for English. Those texts live in a spot at the bottom of my bookshelf, piling up in some dazed system as I fill them with underlines to convince myself I’ve understood the point behind Shakespeare or a novel I really should have focused on. It is a perennial irony of the English student that many of us go into our degrees desperate to read more and find that the assigned readings don’t excite us as we expected.
Reading for pleasure outside class is the surest way of broadening one’s worldview. English classes, for example, tend to deal mainly with British or American literature. This limits the opportunities for broad reading amongst undergraduate courses. Even if students were to take a mix of classes from English, Comparative Literature and Classics, they would probably still only get a light dusting of the panoply of world literature owing to the lack of alignment between the number of classes being run and the distinct specificity of those classes.
Reading outside this means that for the three years of student life, one won’t simply read things written on two corners of the Atlantic, but encounter high-quality writing regardless of its genesis or apparent critical import. Critical reading is valuable and fascinating, though it is only one method and motive of reading.
The great stumbling block of an English major in particular is that the class offerings are very specific, though budget constraints prohibit the faculty from offering enough classes for such specificity to be reflected in a textual variety. This makes reading for pleasure even more essential: you can run a quasi parallel curriculum, reading what you like, when you like. I have tried to pad out the unavoidable limitations that come with doing an English degree through a program of wider reading. You should too!
Of course, this observation does not ring true simply for those doing English degrees. Fundamentally, reading for the fun of it brings colour to life. Let us do away with the snobbish pretensions of those who claim some books are better than others. Indeed, casual reading is probably of the greatest benefit to people who study degrees totally separate to the humanities — if future doctors, economists, or office drones have a wide and warm cultural soup to dip their mental bread into when the occasion arises, ours will be a flowering and robust society. Pick up a book!
Reading for its own sake is a tool of self-education. It is a way of broadening your literary intake outside the tenuous fustiness of a ‘canon’ or the expected texts that unsurprisingly arise in reading lists.
Pleasurable reading during term is essential for it is reading outside academic or analytical parameters. One third-year English student I spoke to felt that literary enjoyment during term time let him “train their brain” to not simply associate the “act of reading” with class. Reading for the fun of it reclaims the act from analysis. The humor and beauty of language stands on its own. A poem is a poem as much as it is a seed of discussion. It removes literature from the instrumental realm of assignments and instead sees it as a thing that ought to be celebrated and enjoyed for its own sake.
To read for its own sake is to be washed over by a sea of text. Sentences and clauses flow out like a lighthouse beam amidst the darkness of ignorance. This reading for experience rather than analytic interpretation is the central value of reading for pleasure. After months of scanning latin hexameters or trying to understand why Orlando chiseled poetry into Rosalind’s tree, it is a blessed relief to not have to hair-split. There is nothing like “the simple rhythm of mental absorption,” as Nabokov’s Kinbote saw it when stumbling into his neighbour’s hedgerow.
The most valuable reading experiences are those that burrow into the soul.
Memorise a poem. Write silly notes in margins that you’ll laugh at twenty years from now. Let the books fall apart with underlines and bent pages. Weep on train carriages in the fading light, for literature’s great power lies in the way the inner lives of characters and ideas are bodied forth in language. Last week I walked around Fisher for a while late at night, reading a poem over to myself in my head. It almost felt far more educational than any classroom.
