Undertaking a doctorate degree, especially a PhD in the humanities, generally means years of being text-bound. Reading papers and books, taking notes, and writing. Rinse and repeat, every day for
three to six years. This cycle is, of course, happily interrupted by teaching commitments, conference visits, giving talks or doing community outreach. Yet fundamentally, the written word is at
the core and reading and digesting the knowledge of a field means skim-reading thousands and thousands of pages. I began my PhD in October 2019 and successfully defended my thesis in the winter
of 2022.
During these years, I lost all pleasure in reading for fun. I read maybe one or two books a year cover-to-cover, usually non-fiction and tangentially related to my research as it is so hard to
switch off. I struggled through these books, fantastic as they were (such as a biography of Beau Brummel, the great Regency dandy). In my teenage years, I went through novels at an immense rate.
Reading was a refuge, a safe space, escapism and inspiration. Yet I did not fight it during my PhD. It would have been pointless to convince myself to stare at books for another hour in the day
after already reading and writing for eight or so hours.
When I finished my PhD, it took several months for me to voluntarily pick up a book with the intention of reading it cover-to-cover. Initially, I felt pretty exhausted and preferred watching
shows and films in the run-up to my viva voce. The thought of having to pick up my thesis again to prepare was looming over me and reading for fun was just not going to happen. So I sped through
a series on Korean cooking and re-watched the Nickelodeon Avatar series.
Not fighting the break in reading for fun was so important. It helped me to particularly focus on hobbies such as hiking and crafting, where I was out in the fresh air or using my hands to create
what brought immediate and visible progress. I still loved books in theory but in practice it just wasn’t the phase of life for reading for fun. My way of going back to reading for fun was to
ease myself into it. I always valued reading so I wanted to reclaim it to a certain degree, without forcing or judging myself. While my professional life is still highly text-based, including
research and writing, it felt like the variety of the workplace gave me enough energy and variety that reading started to seem appealing again.
What worked for me was starting with a comic strip. Pick something such as the Peanuts to enjoy the company of a book without being bogged down by text and the need to concentrate. Then maybe
progress to a short-ish book you find super interesting and really want to read - ideally something that during your PhD you may have thought of as a guilty pleasure, such as a fantasy
novel.
Bit by bit, with taking books I was really interested in, the joy came back. Now over two years since my viva, I‘d say my enjoyment of reading is still not 100% where it was earlier in my life
but that is okay. Books do not need to be finished any time soon. I still balk at book series or very long books. That is a reading volume I don’t currently see fitting into my life. I‘m okay
with reading a page a night and I am trying to read deliberately slowly. I’m having to re-train myself to pay attention to slowing down, taking in every word and also paying homage to beautiful
writing - not just speed-skating through pages to absorb the most pertinent bits of information. Audiobooks and podcasts also helped greatly. The key is taking it slow.