Like many prospective historians, I was drawn to history because of my love of reading. As a child I spent countless hours reading at home and at the school library. I remember being enchanted by the Scholastic book fair and thrilled at the notion that I would be given – GIVEN – a book just for attending. As I grew older reading remained a sanctuary. In high school and in college, I always had a long reading list and stack of books beside my bed, which I would often read instead of spending time studying assigned coursework. Longer or more difficult books would hang around. I’d pick them up and get sidetracked only to return to them weeks or months later.

Becoming a historian seemed like the perfect career path to take my love of reading from hobby to profession. This was (obviously) before I knew what being a historian actually entailed. I learned a little bit about archival research in one of my undergraduate courses, but saw it as supplemental to secondary source reading. I also didn’t understand how difficult the path would be – both through graduate school and finding a career as a historian after graduation.

Still, what shook me most in graduate school was its approach to reading. The sheer pace of the exercise was exhausting; books were mutilated (“just read the intro and a review” was the common refrain) into content that needed to be crammed for classes and comprehensives. Graduate school reading was nothing like any reading I had done before. It was a marathon that felt like a sprint.

So, also like many graduate students in the humanities, my love of reading waned. I didn’t read for pleasure very often and when I did it was either for circumstantial (places with no internet) or social (book clubs) reasons. I lost touch with why books had mattered to me.

Choosing not to pursue an academic career was traumatic, but a silver lining has been that my passion for reading has been reignited. No longer taking part in the information-gathering arms race that is graduate school has allowed me to not only read slower, but also pause and reflect on what I’ve read.

It’s wonderful to really live with a book, to let it sit with you and accompany you. This has held true for fiction and non-fiction. I’ve been reading Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain for about three months, slowly chipping away at it in chunks often to twenty pages. Since it’s in many ways a novel about how time passes,this approach has made me appreciate how Mann structured the novel in a way that flows in the uneven ebbs and flows that subjective time does. It has been similarly rewarding as I’ve read Jill Lepore’s These Truths. Like Mann, Lepore is a pleasure to read and her prose and organization rewards close reading. It’s also refreshing to read a longue durée history from beginning to end and not feel the pressure to skip around or mine for argument.

Obviously, this approach is made possible by the privilege of working routine hours and having a low-stress, low-responsibility home life.At the same time, I can’t help but wonder if I would have learned better –maybe not more, but more deeply – without the pressures to consume as much information as possible. I also wonder if this type of churn disadvantages certain types of students who would benefit from more time to read and reflection each item.

As anyone who has written a dissertation (or any long document) knows well, it takes time to write. So too, to read. Even though there are many days that I yearn for the intellectual engagement and debate of my graduate school years, the solace of slow reading tempers my nostalgia for those days and reminds me of the promises life after graduate school hold for intellectual growth. 

This time of year can be full of holiday- and project-related bustle. Looming end of year deadlines can further heighten an already acute anxiety about not working fast enough. But if you can, resist the urge to rush, take some time to sit down, and read slow.