Life Beyond Coronavirus #3: Daring to Read for Pleasure
This week your Postgraduate Team brings you a piece on reading for fun, and how to do that when you’re so focused on academics. There’s also some positive news from this week and upcoming events at LUU.
Daring to Read for Pleasure
By Sagal Arboshe
As a student, reading for pleasure can seem like one of the biggest crimes you can commit. The eighteen Jstor tabs slowing your laptop down to a crawl stare at you almost as witheringly as your tutor’s physical reading list does. Daring to read something of your choice — something that hits the spot in a way that documents on economic crime don’t quite — is dangerous; a waste of time, a ‘smart’ way of procrastinating.
Almost as difficult as dealing with the guilt of reading for fun, is being able to read for fun. When the bulk of your day is wrapped up in a reading, writing and analysing frenzy it’s natural to feel burnt out and to want to take a break from the written word in favour of a Netflix binge or a (virtual) brew with friends.
For me, this was one of the hardest and most unanticipated aspects of studying BA English Literature. I love reading. At school I would walk from classroom to classroom, cross corridors during crushes and navigate jammed staircases with my head buried in a book.
I recently reflected on when my librarian told me, aged eleven, that I needed to stop exclusively reading Jacqueline Wilson and how intensely I’d cried at the prospect of never having fun again. Reading was an oasis from pubescent concerns. And then it became a timetabled and mandatory part of my life for three years and suddenly the copy of Lolita which I had bought so excitedly after my A-level exams had ended up stranded on my desk, half read, for three and a half years.
Reading inertia — when combined with a desire to read— is incredibly confusing. Lolita would in time be joined by stacks of books I accumulated independent of university reading lists as my desire to read new and exciting narratives grew, but the days of getting through a book-a-week were long gone. This isn’t to say that I don’t like reading anymore, just that over time the act of reading, regardless of format or content, began to feel incompatible with relaxation.
A way in which I have gently started to read for fun (and to actually find the experience fun) is by rethinking the thought that reading is something I’ve only started to do for work. As someone with a very fulfilling and very unhealthy addiction to Reddit and Twitter, I make the choice to click on and read 80 Buzzfeed articles a week for fun. I may not be going through volumes of poetry, but I am dedicating study time towards memorising Fiona Apple lyrics through genius.com. I started by challenging the thought that it’s not fun to read and then I moved on to swapping a few Buzzfeed quizzes a week for a few pages of Terry Pratchett instead.
I also found a lot of relief in the realisation that I didn’t have to go through it cover to cover and make exhaustive notes in just a week. If I picked up a book, read half a page and decided to go back to ‘Too Hot to Handle’ instead, then it was fine. Maybe not a very positive reflection on my taste, but fine. There is no hurry and there are no deadlines when it comes to reading in your own time.
For me, finding a book that I found engrossing was the final piece of the reading puzzle. Recently, I started reading ‘Queenie’ by Candice Carty-Williams. I finished it in a week. When I first started ‘Queenie’ I was intrigued. Despite being a one-time prolific reader and a black-British 20 something it was the first time in my life that I read anything narrated by one. The first time I read something written by one.
I struggled with ‘Queenie.’ Doubting the genuineness of Queenie’s (the titular character) interest in the Black Lives Matter movement, which she at times seems to fixate on as a manifestation of how she — and her interests — aren’t represented in her white dominated journalism office. And not for the vital things it encompasses. At one point, when asked what she’s interested in writing about she replies, “Black Lives Matter things.” I closed the book in anger at the trivialisation of a movement about life or death to “things” she adopts as a way of highlighting her workplace ostracization.
I felt as confused as Queenie during her deeply sexual bouts of anxiety, and the self-destructive tendencies they invoked within her. I groaned “not again” as she shouted at friends and partners to push them away before they could hurt her, all the while wanting to shout for her when they wronged her. Queenie speaks about what it is like to watch black spaces disappear in a gentrifying London with a sad anger and a childhood nostalgia that resonates even with this suburban Yorkshire girl. She speaks about how the black, female body is invaded and thrown aside by men and medical professionals alike; how complete strangers feel the right to touch her braids in wonder as though they exist for public consumption. She challenged the way I think and recreated experiences I’ve trivialised as un-connected to race or womanhood as injustices that should not be withstood.
To read challenging, thrilling and evocative voices, take a step out of your comfort zone and join the Postgraduate Book Club. We’ll be meeting via Google Hangouts every other Wednesday to discuss the books on our reading list, starting with Bernardine Evaristo’s Booker Prize Winning ‘Girl, Woman, Other.’ Contact S.Arboshe@leeds.ac.uk to try a new perspective through an old lens.
Positive News
Here’s a small selection of positive news stories to keep you looking up!
Creative ways of watching movies have emerged in the Czech Republic with a drive-in festival.
What’s On(line) at LUU
The Postgraduate Book Club kicks off this week and will run for a total of four sessions — join us for all of them, or just the ones that interest you!
Also happening this week is Drink and Draw where we encourage you to turn your thesis ideas into art.
