—and that’s fantastic. I read less these days. At my day job, I translate faster; more specifically, I am obligated to translate faster. My writing is cleaner, less opaque. I have less time to mess around with a text until it reads beautifully, and my clients have less patience for such efforts. My meaning and thinking are both clearer. All the time, I process more words. I suspect this is doing something to me. Increasingly I think it’s making me dislike a lot more books.

I have been trying to determine whether the nature of my job has shaped my relationship to leisure reading, without success—apart from that I do less of it. To my surprise, I lately think this is for the best. The bulk reading I did in 2021-2022, when I was badly underemployed and failing to find my footing in a writing market that didn’t suit me, shall not be repeated. Certain genres have fallen away almost entirely, namely romance and contemporary thrillers—though I have found gems in both these genres this year. Most interestingly, reading something that doesn’t somehow challenge me does not relax me; it often has the opposite effect. Perhaps work has trained me into impatience with prose that doesn’t spark.

I no longer keep up with new releases. My digital library loans are much fewer and further between. I am now a very disorganized reader and only successfully get sucked into a novel once a month or so. It happened this past weekend, where I read all but the first 60 pages of Michael Crichton’s Sphere in one sitting; Robin Hobb has been best at it this year. Here is an incomplete list of the books I am in the middle of that I am unsatisfied with in some way:

- Dune, Frank Herbert
- Red Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson
- The Late Americans, Brandon Taylor
- Kudos, Rachel Cusk
- Local Heavens, KM Fajardo
- Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
- Fates and Furies, Lauren Groff

This evening when I sat down to read, I picked up Red Mars. It was immediately obvious this was the wrong choice. What I wanted to read was the next chapter of The Assassination of Herbert Chitepo, a history monograph I picked up again this weekend. It was assigned for a course I audited during my history MA and I have no memory of reading it, but my handwriting is all over the margins. And so I sat down with an academic monograph for pleasure for the third time in two weeks, understanding that I may well get through only three or four pages before I leapt into something else.

And indeed I did. Realizing I did not know the history of colonial Rhodesia, I went to my shelf after a scant two pages and located my copy of Hobsbawm’s Age of Empire. I am rediscovering myself through this hummingbird disposition. My moments spent agonizing about my actual work are blessedly few and far between, but when I have them I always reach for the only thing I actually miss about academia, what may be my truest passion beyond even writing: rigorous research.

I recently found out that my alma mater’s library would grant me borrowing privileges if I filled out a little form, and so I skipped off work a little early a couple Fridays ago and camped out in the university library. I pulled books off shelves with somewhat reckless abandon. I took notes on four, set aside another four, took yet another four home for further research.

And I found myself there. There, I found myself. I know myself well, but I sometimes have trouble locating me. Here: clarity, joy, meaning—using the fullness of my skills accumulated over the years through numerous fields to simply investigate a question for fun.

I have not felt so completely like myself in years. What I am at my core is someone compelled to look into matters.

Reading and research are two different modes, but they’ve blurred together for me over the years. I’ve struggled with it, but now I’m wondering if it might be an asset. I, as a reader/researcher, can look into matters; but a compelling book must also do this. Despite his relative inaccessibility, Jeff Vandermeer might be my favourite writer because, without fail, every book of his looks into matters. I am looking into matters with him, or with his characters, or both. This is what guides my reading now: I always want to discover something. If a single book won’t lead me there, I will leap to another.

There’s a degree of dissatisfaction to this approach in an era where reading is so heavily catalogued and gamified. I have “only” finished 22 books in 2026—another reduction from the previous year. My current reads are always in the dozens. I abandon books for months before picking them up again, often from the beginning. A trend I find genuinely discouraging is that I am reading from much fewer racialized authors because I am allowing whim alone to lead me.

But, warts and all, there’s also a genuineness to this approach to reading that I am really appreciating. I am picking up more doorstoppers because I don’t care as much about statistics. My reading can be patchy, it is often disorganized, sometimes it is iterative. It is also very honest and unforced. I have finally unlocked reading for pleasure for myself again, and it’s completely incoherent. It looks like dogshit. Hallelujah. Let’s go back to the library.

I read four pages of Hobsbawm before putting him down again. Hobsbawm is a great writer. I have never read a book of his cover to cover, but I think I will with this one; he’s looking into matters. On my way to my laptop to put all this down, I grabbed The Secret History off the shelf. It’s the right time of year for it—a good time to indulge in the fiction of academia I find myself stuck in year after year, in September and out of it: that there is a version of this profession where they will just let you look stuff up all day. There isn’t. There is teaching in the AI era and—heaven forfend—writing with an expectation of making a palpable impact. There are exams, there is financial insecurity, there are self-worth problems, there is stress. I don’t want stress. I want to look into something. And I see no reason to be constrained by anything so banal as “finishing a book” on my way to do it.