Jane Crowley attempts to remedy the side effects of an English degree.

As an English student, I hear the words “You must like reading” at least three times a week. The answer to this has always been to nod profusely and exclaim “I love it!” This has changed recently, and I find myself thinking that the truthful answer now is that I used to love it. I’ve gone from devouring a 500 page novel in less than 12 hours, to someone who has the same book at the bedside for nearly a month.

I’m not alone. I’ve noticed this phenomenon in several other fellow English students, and also in members of other departments where the reading commitment is heavy. I’ve begun to piece together a hypothesis as to why this is and what we can do about it.

There seem to be three main issues with reading for pleasure once you begin reading for study on a regular basis. The first one is fairly obvious and will be familiar to most of you – the time issue. This is when your seminar reading has mounted up to one huge tome of archaic prose, three epic poems and two critical discussions and it has to be done by 9:15 the next day.

The latest bestseller, however good, is not getting a look in on a day like this.

The next factor is “the snobbery issue”. These days when I buy a book I find myself asking some, if not all, the following questions. Is the author well acclaimed? Have enough intellectual-sounding people written recommendations on the back? Will this fit in with my impressive list of scholarly texts for the term? What kind of literary merit can a book called Captain Underpants and the Talking Toilet actually have? Ok, so in the case of that particular book, the question might be valid, but as a general rule, this kind of approach is so wrong, and yet so many of us do it. There was a time when I really didn’t care what other people thought of what I read. What happened?

The final offender is one I have chosen to call “the massive mental-breakdown issue”. Reading, for many of us, has become a genuinely exhausting process. Our brain-cells now do several complex things all at once, which they never did before. They start searching out lines of argument to manipulate into essay material as soon as you turn the first page. They start musing on the social and historical context of the book. Sometimes, and this is a sign of serious over-work, they even start remembering useful critical theories that relate to what you’re reading. This is all well and good for academic reading, but it makes relaxing with a book completely impossible.

So what can we do? Well first off, let’s tackle timing. One thing we are surely all guilty of is checking Facebook at least every five minutes, if not more. I tried something the other week. Unless I had work that needed to be done imminently, I didn’t turn my computer on at all. This resulted, believe it or not, in racing through 382 pages of a (seriously non-literary) fantasy novel in one afternoon. Also, make yourself a cup of tea. Partly because tea solves everything, but also because that way you have to sit still, and if you have to sit still, you might as well read.

To tackle the snobbery issue I am going to set you a challenge. Either go to a bookshop and pick up a title at random, without checking the blurb or the author’s name, and buy it, and read it. Or, ask a friend for the most obscure thing they’ve read in the last year, and read that. You might hate it, but it’s a start.

The massive mental-breakdown issue is more problematic. I suppose everyone has their own way to relax, but relaxing isn’t the same thing as shutting off the bit of your brain that studies. I think the only real answer to this is practise. Re-learn how to read without over-analysing. The more you read the more you will read. The sad thing is that by formalising our love of reading, we have lost our wonder at the story. And isn’t that really what it’s all about?