Sarah Moss on Different Kinds of Reading

I’ve sometimes heard readers say that they love books too much to study literature. They fear that literary criticism would destroy the pleasures of reading, converting joy into work. When I hear this, I feel sorry that committed readers deny themselves the joy that lies in reading-as-work, because there are many ways of reading and many kinds of pleasure to be found and made between the covers.

I am always reading different books in different ways, not exactly at the same time because isn’t one of the delights of reading the way it takes over, prevents multi-tasking, demands and permits a single focus? So not at the same time, exactly, but on the same days. Today, for example, I am reading a novel because I’m reviewing the author’s next book and I find it polite and useful to know at least some of the backlist before formulating an opinion on new work. I am reading a book of essays about embroidery because it called out to me in a bookshop and also because, being between books myself, I like to read about creative process. I am reading a cookbook because after a difficult couple of years I’m trying to find my way back to a more joyful relationship with food and cooking, but maybe also a bit because reading cookbooks is a way of indulging my fascination for food that’s less vexed than eating. I am reading a memoir, slowly because it turns out to be mostly about gardening which I consider to be outdoor housework but persistently because it’s well-written and thoughtful. I am re-reading I Capture the Castle because it cheers me up, not that I am otherwise cheerless. 

This last kind of reading, the cheering up, is probably the one people are afraid of spoiling, and it’s true that if I engaged my critical faculties and training, the book would be less cheering though no less pleasurable. I would be paying more attention to the class and gender politics, though also to the exact weight of the imagery that builds the enchanting setting. I would be noticing the historical context and admiring the interweaving of themes rather than looking forward to the heroine’s next meeting with the object of her affections. I would still be having a good time, but it would be a different, more cerebral, good time, more like the work of reviewing in which I also find joy. It’s like enjoying both a stroll around a botanic garden while wearing silly shoes and a properly equipped ascent of Scafell. You don’t have to worry that if you climb a mountain you’ll stop liking the park.

But my mountain-and-park metaphor breaks down – they all do, eventually – because the same book can be both. The writing I have studied most seriously overlaps with the writing I have found most comforting in times of trouble. My grandmother used to recite to me the poems she’d learnt as a girl, mostly nineteenth-century classics. I memorised her favourites and mine when I was young enough for it to be easy, and found their incantation hugely consoling when I had to do or endure hard things. I still do: the planes I’m on survive takeoff and landing only because I’m muttering Tennyson’s In Memoriam, and it’s worth sparing the breath while running up a hill with my tall, fit, 21 year old son for Wordsworth’s Ode to Intimations of Immortality.(‘Mum, are you declaiming again?).’ Still, I wrote a PhD on Romantic poetry, which only deepened my love and understanding. I prefer, mostly, to think like a reader more than like a scholar, but scholars are readers too and no-one undertakes literary criticism for the money. Even if we’re reading a book we dislike because a contract, deadline or assessment obliges us to do so, done properly, reading is usually an act of love of one kind or another, and where there’s love, there’s joy.