Reading for Pleasure
By Asher Gelzer-Govatos
Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things. – Philippians 4:8
I’ve been trying out a new discipline lately. Every morning, after I stagger out of bed and secure some coffee, I do three things: I pray a rosary, I read a chapter from the Bible, and I spend as much time as I can justify reading a novel for pleasure. At the moment I have two going: War and Peace, which my wife and I are reading together after she discovered that you could scale Tolstoy’s mountain in about a year by reading one short chapter each day; and Martin Chuzzlewit, another nineteenth century doorstopper, and, in my opinion, one of Charles Dickens’ more underrated books.
Does it seem strange that I, an English professor, have had to carve out time to read for pleasure? Surely if “the just man justices,” as Gerard Manley Hopkins said, then an English professor reads. That’s true of course. I read a great deal, both as I prepare for class and as I putter along with research. Right now I’m in the thickets of a challenging semester, so I’m devoting time to texts both familiar to me (Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier for my Intro to Fiction class), and far outside my realm of comfort (asking a twentieth century scholar to teach a class on Chaucer is a bit like enlisting a podiatrist to perform heart surgery).
But what I’ve found, in my own life, is that reading for a distinct end – even a noble end like conveying the beauty of Anthony Trollope’s sentences to students, or working out the puzzle at the heart of a poem by W.H. Auden for research – works at cross purposes to the ultimate value of literature in my life: to refresh my soul with the admirable and the true. Do people in other vocations struggle with this blurring of the lines between work and rest? I can envision an enraptured mathematician cracking open the mysteries of the universe as she cracks open a cold one on her porch, but for most people I suspect there’s little overlap between what they do at their job and how they refresh themselves in their leisure hours.
We literature professors, though, find ourselves in a bind. Most of us entered the profession having loved deeply a leisure activity, but we find ourselves forced to work on something we first approached from love. So we teach, and we research, and then we head home burned out, ready to turn on Top Chef and zone out. I even find it a struggle, when teaching texts I dearly love, to preserve my own enthusiasm for a book as I tear it apart to show students the value of diction, or motifs, or whatever might most need teaching.
And so, to safeguard the love that drives my vocation, I have decided to prioritize time for pleasure reading. To me, it is critical that this reading involves three components: first, it must come at the beginning of the day; second, it must be detached from immediate teaching and research; and third, it must be centered on books that are not merely relaxing, but have some value for contemplation.
The first of these strictures is easy enough to understand: if I wait until the end of the day, I am too worn down by the various stresses of life to give my attention to a text in a meaningful way. Starting the day with reading for pleasure frames all that follows: what I do when I teach and research follows from this first love, which I am reminded of first thing. Just as I start my day with prayer and scripture to ground myself in the reality of God's truth and love, I read for pleasure straight away to keep the loveliness of literature in my brain for the rest of the day. But also, reading for pleasure in the morning means being able to focus on my pleasure reading. That may seem a little counterintuitive at first (doesn’t leisure entail no requirement for focus), but in fact part of the pleasure comes from the concentration—what I am able to learn when I am not learning for a goal.
But why restrict myself (secondly) to books outside of my immediate teaching and research needs – and even outside my areas of expertise? Because focused aimlessness is critical to this endeavor. I need to be moved by whim, by a lonely impulse of delight, or my reading quickly dissolves into another box to be checked. I find aimless reading to be of immense value even during times of actual research, but it’s even more vital to protect my love of literature in my hours of useless pleasure reading.
The great Christian professor of literature Alan Jacobs, in his book The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, recounts the story of a critic who once a year would reread Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, even though he knew he would never write a word about the book. He did so, Jacobs assesses, “Because he knew himself, knew what he needed, knew what would give him the kind of delight that he craved.” Jacobs goes on to argue that the critic was driven by one particular part of our human nature, the part that “knows itself and therefore seeks what is really good.”
That leads to the third key component: books that will nourish and refresh the love that drives my vocation. The particulars may vary by person, of course – taste plays a role – but it matters that the books I read for pleasure concern themselves with deep questions, and do so in patient, thoughtful ways. I’m skeptical of grandiose claims about how literature can change us for the better, but at their best novels do help us puzzle through the various complications of real life. As the great philosopher turned novelist Iris Murdoch says, “In the traditional novel the people, the story, the innumerable kinds of value judgements both illuminate and celebrate life, and are judged and placed by life, in a reciprocal process. We read great novels with all our knowledge of life engaged, the experience is cognitive and moral in the highest degree.” Reading texts that encompass life and remain open to life’s complications forces me to engage my whole inner self.
Despite being a scholar of the twentieth century – a period I deeply love – I find myself, then, drifting in my moments of pleasure reading toward those gargantuan novels of the nineteenth century that dare to tackle the full richness of societies. Contemporary novels feel confident enumerating human evils, an important subject, but often shy away from depicting people and events that are admirable, noble, and lovely. So I return to Dickens, who gives us not only the roundly hypocritical Seth Pecksniff, but also the indefatigably cheerful and loyal Mark Tapley. Or George Eliot, whose good characters are always flawed and whose bad characters retain the possibility of redemption. Next I might try Père Goriot by Balzac, whose work I’ve never read and whose novels I will never write about in my academic life. We’ll just have to see where the next whim takes me. Wherever that is, I trust I’ll find something excellent and praiseworthy waiting for me, reminding me of the admirable and the true, and refreshing me in all I do.
Asher Gelzer-Govatos is a Carver Project alumnus and a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Doane University. He is also the co-host of The Readers Karamazov, a podcast about philosophy and literature. You can follow him on Twitter @conceptofdredd.