Reading

Am I a 'bad reader'?

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?

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 Perhaps it’s our view of contemporary reading that is outdated, outmoded, and based on archaic ideals about time, leisure, and worth.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.

[I return to this question of ‘free time’ in a future post.]

What do we mean by reading for pleasure? Of course, there are multiple pleasures to indulge when we read.

Early on in my teaching career, a friend put me onto Roland Barthes’ distinction between “Texts of Pleasure” and “Texts of Bliss”.⁴

A text of pleasure (translated from the French plaisir - which means…well...pleasure’) is:

“…the text that contents, fills, grants euphoria: the text that comes from culture and does not break with it, it is linked to a comfortable practice of reading.”

A text of bliss (translated from the French jouissance - a phrase which means something closer to sexual ecstasy) is:

“…the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain boredom), unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language.”

‘Good readers’, ‘critical readers’, and ‘close readers’ find their calling in the arena of bliss. Reading for plain old pleasure is often derided as predictable.

And yet, I’m convinced that reading for ‘pleasure’, to read a text that is comfortable or comforting, can be, for some readers, a radical act.

But it’s not just reading for pleasure that we need to worry about.

If, as Emre writes, “close reading, critical reading, depth reading; the canon, the curriculum, the literature seminar” is “the overwhelmingly familiar…equipment that goes into the making of good readers,” we should be troubled by the decline of young people choosing to study English at University. Last year, the British Academy reported that:

between 2012 and 2019, English Studies undergraduate students fell by 20%, with a further decrease of 3% between 2019 and 2021.⁵

In the UK, we have a double crisis on our hands. We have a crisis in reading for pleasure (which I’m loosely and hesitantly associating with ‘bad’ reading). But we also have a crisis in reading for bliss (or ‘good’ reading). What role do our institutions - schools, universities, colleges, libraries and so on have to play in promoting one, or the other, or both?

Both

The answer is always both for me. I’m a Gemini. I’m dual heritage. I’m a working-class academic. Paradox, ambivalence, contradiction - these are the sensations I know and embrace.

And so, I walk a tightrope. Here, I want to exploit the tension between my position as an established expert and the resistance I feel towards established ways of reading, being, and understanding.⁶

After all, as Emre writes:

…neither literature departments nor universities are closed systems; the people who flit into and out of these institutional spaces often do double — and sometimes triple and quadruple — duty as readers, writers, and human actors in many different social contexts. There is no reason, then, to assume that people’s methods of reading can or should remain constant throughout the situational twists and turns of their day-to-day lives.

And I flit. I flit, and I’m drawn to those who similarly flit. Perhaps that should’ve been the name of this Substack.

I’ve got to be honest with you: I’m not sure where I’m going with this whole Substack thing. So far, I have two goals.

1. To write regularly and share it with a small group of readers.

2. To celebrate readers, readings, and texts which have the power to be unruly and disruptive, which blur the lines, which can be both.

Sometimes it’s bad to be a good reader, and sometimes it’s good to be a bad reader.

1. Understatement. Especially given some of the work I’ve done around literacy, universal design for learning, access and inclusion. The sort of perspective we saw recently in The Atlantic and elsewhere places such an emphasis on what we read and how quickly…why? I’ll be writing more about attention span and discipline (as somebody who struggles to sustain both of these things).

2. Published 2017. I might reflect more on the phrase ‘paraliterary’ and ‘paraliterature’ in a future post. If I remember…

3. Which is what I ended up defending on the radio. Critical reading that is. I suppose I was trying to clarify our purpose in the classroom.

4. See Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (1973). Here’s a link to a Barthes reader edited by Susan Sontag if you fancy a deep dive. I’m really cherry-picking quotations here.

5. There’s a more complex picture (regionally, for instance) if you read the full report. Also, see the data from the English Association on the recent uptick in trends.

6. The resistance I feel towards? The resistance I meet via?

***Photo via Unsplash ***

I love photographs and paintings of women reading. Eve Arnold’s photo of Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses (which a colleague of mine has in her home) is one of my favourites. And a friend recently shared this Vanessa Bell painting via Instagram (in the link I’ve shared, it’s featured as a limited edition cover of Harper’s Bazaar but it is currently on display at the Vanessa Bell exhibition at the MK Gallery). It reminds me of a photograph I have of my grandmother reading. She loved books.