Sometimes, when you study a book, it ruins the pleasure of simply reading it. Sometimes, it enhances the experience, especially, I've found, with books I might not otherwise read or which would require more thought to read because of the sentence structure.
At the back of my mind is the thought that I need to find a topic (or several) to focus on for a dissertation, but I'm also trying to spend the summer reminding myself why I wanted to study literature in the first place. Reading books which bring pleasure. Which are easy to read and which I enjoy.
Weigh up whether I risk ruining a favourite author (Georgette Heyer) by studying one or other of her works. Although, I'm not sure that anything could ruin the comfort and joy I get from those books. As she said herself: good escapist fiction. She also thought she ought to be shot for writing it, but that if she was stuck in an air-raid shelter, she'd probably rather like such fiction to pass the time. (Before anyone complains that escapist fiction isn't Good Enough for Serious Study: someone this year did a dissertation on teacher representation in Harry Potter.)
For myself, I find Real Life complicated enough. I like the simplicity of a story I don't really need to think about. It doesn't matter if it's the sort of thing that gets labelled Holiday Reading and generally considered trashy (usually by snooty people who think you should only read Literature), or if it's something sort of formulaic where you know the Good Guys will win out in the end, regardless of genre.
But this summer, after reading all the Worthy Literature of the last academic year, I'm largely reading escapist stuff. Books which bring joy and fuzzy emotions and don't demand too much thought.
Of course, I'm also going to be rereading Heyer's An Infamous Army, and making a first read of Thackeray's Vanity Fair, to see if my initial dissertation idea has any legs. It's a Waterloo-based idea, so there'll also be a read of Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe's Waterloo and a dip into Wellington's Dispatches. And maybe a reread of the last Poldark novel. I seem to recall several Poldarks taking part in the battle. And then doing some preliminary research, which will probably start with Thackeray: he's the most likely to have the sort of scholarly research I might need.
I'll start with easy reads, though. Actually, I've already started on the reread of An Infamous Army. I'm reading it to Tiny in the evenings.
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