Belated happy new year to you all! I hope you’ve got plenty of books ready to read in 2019 – I know I have. And I hope that at least some of these books are being read for pleasure – because mine are not. When I opted to do English literature at Glasgow Uni all the way back in November 2016, it was because I genuinely loved reading new books for pleasure. I had always been a voracious reader, consuming novel and newspaper alike. Indeed my awareness only broadened in my fifth, final year at school, discovering properly the joys of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and with it unlocking the previously closed door of drama. At university, however, the time to read for pleasure has simply disappeared.
What happened? Did I lose my love for books? Hardly – ironically I read more now than I ever did before going to university. It is plain what has happened to my reading for pleasure, along with many pursuits – I write less, I run less, I go to the library less. My degree, ironically dependent in origin on my enjoying reading for pleasure, has completely annihilated it through strenuous demands of one book a week, no matter how large the book. Even if I did have time to read for pleasure, there would be no flow in my reading. I would pick up a book, read it for a few days, then get sidelined by the 500-page monstrosity that is on the horizon. And skimming, as any literature student knows, is simply not an option once you get beyond first year.Tutors will expect you to know detail and go into detail, otherwise you will lose marks on seminar/tutorial participation, which makes up 10% of my overall grade; not enough for a platform to success or relaxation, but enough to break your mark and thus your passage into Honours in my case. As a student at a Scottish university, I am doing this for four years rather than the typical three in the rest of the UK. I am not even halfway through my degree as a second-semester second year student. The thought of Honours reading, in all its convolution and complication, to put it simply, gives me The Fear.
Of course, there are other factors in this. Perhaps if I hadn’t gone to university at 17 I would have been better prepared by doing a sixth year at school. Yet I can keep up with my peers who did do a sixth year, so that doesn’t seem to be the case. I do admit that my motivation to read can be very much flagging at times, such as when I went into an exam last semester intending to write on The Dispossessed, a book I hadn’t actually finished. Yet even the people I know who blaze through the assigned books early or even before the semester begins are stressed and struggle to read solely for pleasure. This wouldn’t be problematic for a degree such as engineering or physics, where reading for those students will mostly be a secondary activity in university, i.e. one not usually necessary for the success of the degree. But English lit students need to read for their degree, and reading for pleasure will often produce better students.
My point here is that there is a clear irony of doing an English literature degree because you love reading. You get in to the subject because of your reading for pleasure, you achieve the grades in part because you read for pleasure, yet when you actually start the degree built on your reading for pleasure, the said pleasure is taken out of reading for the most part. While some course books are eminently loveable – I was transfixed by Frankenstein after reading it for the first time in first year – I would say the majority are harder to read for pleasure. Books such as Woolf’s Orlando and Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier are more praised for their accomplished, complex narrative structure and style than their actually being good reads. I’m no literary luddite, demanding only satisfying, simple plots in the main and Jane Eyre for dessert, but I am a very Epicurean reader. I can appreciate narratology but I don’t find it pleasurable at all. After a few weeks of modernist texts, I’m dying to read anything that doesn’t question itself in a referential tautology, and this is coming from a man who has read Tristram Shandy cover-to-cover. Of course, this makes my work on these texts less proficient than my work on a book I enjoyed, because I slogged through the book rather than appreciated it.
The conclusion of this is clear. In an era where university is becoming a commercial business not too far apart from a private secondary school, where results matter and drop-out rates scare off potential students, where I was told on my first day to look at the person on my left and right and told one of us wouldn’t make it to third year, where vice-chancellors are rewarded via extreme pay packets, where colleges can simply take the name ‘University’ if they wish, English lit must change itself. It can’t be disinterested, self-referential, obsessed with false idols. Courses, at least pre-honours, should allow reading for pleasure, through the course itself if necessary. To lower drop-out rates, increase student satisfaction and broaden the horizons of students, I can think of no better measure.