Professional vs. Pleasure Reading

This summer I rediscovered pleasure reading. Or, maybe closer to the point, I rediscovered what it is that I love about reading. As a librarian who works 9-to-5 and tries to keep up my scholarship--and a mother of two relatively young kids--my reading time is squeezed into the rare spare moment. This is especially true since our children don’t seem to need sleep, but you don’t need to hear about that….

Anyway, my main point is that although my reading time has almost entirely vanished, I’ve been trying, grimly, to keep up the professional reading that is key to my scholarship. That means that I’ve spent a lot of nights trying to slog through some work of literary criticism just before bed and getting about a page and a half read. When I do give myself freedom to read a novel, I try to pick something useful--i.e., something from the 19th century that is relevant to my scholarship. I’m not quite sure when reading stopped being something that I enjoy, but I’ve been so caught up in obligatory reading that I almost forgot how much I enjoy reading for entirely different reasons.

This summer’s vacation was different, though. Unlike trips where I load my suitcase with books and articles that I really *should* read (and that I wind up avoiding), I gave myself license to download whatever I felt like reading that was available through my library for the Kindle app. Sure, there are some 19th-century novels in that category, but there are also a lot of totally irrelevant books (from a professional point of view), like the Shopaholic series and a completely nonserious romance/mystery by Janet Evanovich called *Foul Play* (there’s a love story and a missing dancing chicken. That’s probably all you need to know). Since I was on vacation--and I was really trying to leave work behind--I stopped feeling guilty about reading them.

Along the way, I re-discovered contemporary fiction, like Jenni Fagan’s *The Panopticon* and Kathryn Stockett’s *The Help.* I used to enjoy reading pretty broadly in contemporary fiction before I specialized in the nineteenth century and became overwhelmed by the sheer number of novels, poems, plays, and short stories produced in that period (this is a big part of Franco Moretti’s claims for the value of distant reading). I’ll never get through all the works that I *should* read from the nineteenth century, much less everything else that relates to my research.

I’m not saying that I’m giving up on reading nineteenth-century literature and literary scholarship: one reason that I chose to specialize in the nineteenth century was because I’m interested in that very explosion of literature. At the same time, I recognize that it enriches my scholarship to keep up with what is being produced today. After all, an article that I published recently on Coppola’s Dracula and early film owes as much to my consumption of period films and Sarah Waters novels as anything else. I also think that it’s important for my quality of life to remember that reading can be a pleasure, whether that means *Lady Audley’s Secret* or Maria Semple’s amazing *Where’d You Go, Bernadette?*