Pleasure Reading?

In college, I made a rule for myself that I would try to read for pleasure at least one hour a day. Although I didn't always adhere to this, I discovered almost all of my favorite books by reading outside of those books assigned for class. Vanity Fair, Bleak House, One Hundred Years of Solitude - I never would have read them if I didn't allow myself to wander aimlessly in the library, looking for the next novel to sink my teeth into. After I graduated and moved to England, the demands of my dissertation and going to the pub cut significantly into my leisure reading time, a fact I resented greatly. Despite all this, one of my most treasured times from that year is the exact moment (and I remember it so vividly) I finished E.M. Forster's absolute masterpiece Howards End. For the next week, I talked to everyone and anyone about that book- my professor, my flatmate, myself, the check-out guy at Sainsburys. On a gray day that was spitting the worst kind of English rain, that book made me feel incredibly alive again.

I think it was Freud who said that people need meaningful work and meaningful love to be happy. Yes. But I happen to need books as well. And so, in the interest of my sanity, I am re-instituting the reading rule for myself. It probably won't be an hour, certainly not the first tumultuous weeks of school. But I need it to replenish what I'm doing, what I'm putting out there each day in the classroom, if that makes sense.

So if you see me with my nose in a book, that's what I'm doing- recharging.

Angle of Repose (Contemporary American Fiction)

Wallace Stegner