Happy New Year!
I think that when you’re a literary academic, it’s a given that your job involves reading. A lot of reading. Not just monographs, and collections, and philosophical treatises. You read multiple dissertations as supervisor, and as examiner. What this means is that your reading for the year will likely be 80% for work, 20% for “pleasure”. There’s always an overlap. When I make my yearly “for pleasure” reading goals, I’m always aware that some of those books are also related for my research or supervision. It’s why sometimes I give up on keeping track of these things. And why between 2023-2024 I had a sort of reading fatigue during my downtime, preferring to play video games or watch tv series instead.
I’m happy that in 2025 I managed to reverse that and break my reading-for-pleasure block. Reading for work is different. I don’t always finish the entire book I’m rereading. For instance, I’ve dipped into the books of more than one spatial scholar, more than one phenomenologist several times during the course of 2025. Every time a PhD supervisee asks me about this theory or that theory, I find myself diving into another theoretical rabbithole. But reading for pleasure is an entirely different ontology. You dive in as though swimming in words. You inhale, you exhale. And if the book is good enough, you are lost in the story. You live in it. It’s been a couple or so years since I’d been able to experience that. It’s a really good thing I was able to do it again in 2025.
I’m not going to tell you how many books I’ve read because things like reading goals have become weaponised in online dominance games and I can’t be having with that nonsense. I will tell you I read many new books and reread many childhood and teenhood favourites. And it was good. No, it was better than good. It was blissful and oh-so-healing.
Some Highlights: Sonia Sulaiman’s edited collectionThyme Travellers, Martha Wells’s Murderbot Diaries, the brilliant novels of Tash Aw, Helen Oyeyemi’s Peaces and Kamila Shamsie’s Kartography. I also made inroads into my reread of The Wheel of Time and am now reading Book 7 with much relish.
As with my main author blog, posts on this blog are going to change. No more numbers, or listings, or goals or things that get weaponised. But more thoughts like these will be hopefully be the feature of future posts.
Further reading:
- My post about my yearly tradition of rereading Derrida’s Aporias is now up on my main author blog .
- This article I co-wrote with my PhD supervisee Altaf Ahmad Khan about Kamila Shamsie’s Kartography (the reason why I was reading and rereading it in 2025).