The Value of Reading
When I first began thinking and writing about what it meant to study the humanities, it was always from the perspective of scholarship. Why should scholars study literature? How does humanistic pursuit provide value to the academy? How do the digital humanities enhance the way we conceptualize history?
As of May 2016, I’ve officially been removed from academic scholarship for over a year. I haven’t written a critical essay since my graduation. I haven’t formally discussed a novel or read a purely theoretical source. Instead, I learned to code and played a lot of music.
This doesn’t mean that I’ve stopped reading. It’s true that I no longer read multiple books at a time. I’ve stopped underlining passages I’ll want to use in an essay later. I don’t try to leaf through books I read a year and a half ago to find the perfect quotation to support the argument I’m making now.
Luckily, this doesn’t mean that my ability to read has diminished. Rather, I’ve rediscovered reading for pleasure, and I’ve realized that when I’m reading, I feel remarkably happier.
I’ve always read ravenously, picking up a book during every spare moment I could find. This meant reading in the midst of family dinners, during movies, on the playground. It’s still a family joke that all of my pages used to be crinkled from getting wet while I read in the shower, my arm sticking out past the shower curtain while I shampooed my fiction-filled noggin with my left hand.
I managed to read every age-appropriate (and some inappropriate) book in my house by the time I was 10, and I spent middle school picking out books from the library and reading them in a day or two. In second grade, I designed and built a book holder for an “Invention Convention.” My motivation was so to read heavy books in bed.
This was a stage of gathering inventory and learning to be a person in the process. I learned about how to treat your friends from Harry Potter, and how to be brave from Inkheart. I learned to fantasize and pursue my creative impulses. I read solely for pleasure.
It wasn’t until high school that I began to engage more seriously with literature. I tentatively began to push myself, writing essays on Lord of the Flies and The House on Mango Street, Edith Wharton, and Anna Karenina. In my junior year of high school, I stumbled upon a burgeoning curiosity in literary criticism.
In college, I began to study literature with more rigor, declaring my English major at the end of my sophomore year after engaging with postcolonial theorists like Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak. (This was during the phase where I valued complicated ideas over clarity and good writing.)
I took a theory course in my junior spring, and fell in love. It was a survey course, spanning from Aquinas to Audre Lorde. I would sit in my bedroom poring over Kant or Butler, trying to untangle their phrases and to derive meaning from their impenetrable sentences. Slowly, a luminous crescent of understanding began to illuminate my mind’s darkness. As I read, I felt the pleasure of following thesis to it’s end. I could identify where an idea came from and where it was going. My brain started to synthesize ideologies and concepts, and started to apply them to my own reading. It was thrilling.
During my senior year, I wrote a thesis entitled “Joycean Babeling: Scattered Language in ‘Oxen of the Sun” on linguistics in Ulysses. It was a deeply theoretical paper, perhaps too much so. I obsessed over every turn of phrase, every neologism, and every hint of clarity in the pages. I read and re-read and thought of nothing else for months. By the end of it, I was exhausted.
I took on a lot my senior spring, between a class on Modernity and Enchantment to an Independent Study in critical theory. But nothing quite met the intensity I felt and the energy I expended for Ulysses. Quite literally, I gave that book everything I had.
A year out, I don’t have that in me anymore. At least, not right now. In a way, it consumed me. I don’t write critical essays, but I still write. I don’t underline important passages, but I still read. And I can never unlearn all of that intellectual rigor, all of that theoretical backstory, all of that logical process.
I have earned reading for pleasure. I’ll never read for a plot again. Now, I can devour a book and easily synthesize the progression of its thesis. I can consider it from a series of lenses. I can understand it’s underlying problems, and recognize its racist, sexist, heteronormative, heterocissexist, classist, and ableist underbelly while still appreciating it as a work of art. I have earned the ability to continue learning even as the classroom has faded, my teachers have become my friends, and I spend my days coding.
And even better, I can sit down on the subway with a good book and my surroundings disintegrate. Instead, I’m watching Clarissa Dalloway, Stephen Dedalus, David Copperfield, and Eileen Myles all wander different streets while trying come to terms with their own humanity. I’ve done that too, in my own way. It’s nice to know I’m not alone.
