Reading
I recently confessed on live national radio that I struggle to read.
I didn’t phrase it in those words precisely. But that’s what I was thinking. Sometimes, I struggle to focus. Sometimes, I struggle to find the time. I lack discipline. And I just didn’t have another answer to Shahidha Bari’s question about a book I should’ve finished but hadn’t. There are so many books I’ve bought and not read.
As I left the studio, draped in that magnificent electric blue light which beams down from Broadcasting House in London, a vague sense of panic crept into my mind.
What am I doing? Who am I to tell anybody anything about reading?
I’ve called this initial run of my Substack Confessions of a ‘Bad’ Reader in honour of that interview. As a literature academic who has been in higher education for more than two decades, the public might assume I’m a paragon of voracious and virtuous reading. But actually, my reading habits (and tastes) are unruly, undisciplined, and downright wayward. Is there some joy to be taken from embracing a more capacious, expansive, and unexpected approach to reading?
What do you mean by ‘bad’?
Note the scare quotes. The very notion of there being such a thing as a ‘bad reader’ actually nauseates me.1 We all read differently and diversely and come to words and stories in the ways that work for us. This Substack celebrates that. E-books, print books, audiobooks, reading at pace, or reading slowly, reading routinely or irregularly, however you consume your ‘text’ (screen, stage, performance, art), I’m here for it.
I hope, too, that by aligning myself with the joys, pleasures, and politics of those who are all too often admonished by the literary elite, I can continue to embrace my position ‘on the edge’ of things despite my day job. To be more specific, I don’t want to end up being quoted in an article chastising students for ‘failing’ to find the time to read certain types of books. All of the students I’ve worked with have a passion for books, reading, and storytelling. Perhaps it’s our view of contemporary reading that is outdated, outmoded, and based on archaic ideals about time, leisure, and worth.
In her book Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America,2 Merve Emre tackles (and problematises) the distinction between:
bad readers…individuals socialized into the practices of readerly identification, emotion, action, and interaction…
and
the figure of the good reader — once hailed as the “close reader” by the New Critics, later as the “critical reader” by literary theorists…
As a critic, as an ‘expert’, I’m very interested in the limitations and problems of reading things that are ‘relatable’, or make us feel comfortable, or lead to a sense of closure, or that we can easily describe to others.
I teach close reading. I teach critical reading.3
I’ve spent my whole career trying to write about books, performances, and public figures that we might struggle to identify with, empathise with, or understand completely. It’s the one thing that connects my ostensibly random research specialities (in passing-for-white novels, professional wrestling, Grace Jones, lyric poetry).
But at home, I’m very much drawn to emotion, action, and interaction. I love a good plot. I love feeling as though I’ve made a friend in a narrator.
Reading for pleasure
There has been a lot in the news recently about a reading crisis in the UK. The latest research from the National Literacy Trust suggests that “children and young people’s enjoyment of reading is at crisis point, falling drastically in the last year alone”, with less than 35% of children reporting that they read for pleasure in their free time…