Reading for pleasure

Find what you enjoy and read about it

By Joshua Jordan

You live in a bizarro time

On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) characterized the novel coronavirus as a pandemic. These are not normal circumstances in which to live. Once-mundane activities have somehow evolved into a relic of the past: socializing, exercising, and shopping, to name but a few.

A luxury  still in most of our control, however, is the power to read. Right now, reading for pleasure is seemingly one of only a few keys that effectively locks the door behind which insanity is fighting to break through. With the trifling current affairs, the mountain of emails piling up in your inbox (what was once a nod is now an email), the surging amount of end-of the semester busy work, family affairs, and so on, reading is a way to decompress and evade the whirlwind; it's the new mundane, in lieu of socializing, exercising, and shopping—at least for now.

A refreshing respite

As if it wasn’t already the case pre-pandemic, it’s especially easy right now to feel clamored by everything around us. Personally, delving into a book is a great way to distance myself from the chaos and to decompress. The key, however, is finding something you like, then reading about it. While my taste is continually evolving, I’ve been able to find books on everything I’m interested in.

Why not pick up a book and instantly learn about, say, conformal cyclic cosmology in which there are cycles of time and no testable beginning of time (in part because, the theory goes, "time" didn't always exist); or you're reading about a so-called weird scientist whose prescient mathematics in the early 20th century foreshadowed the discovery of the positron (the antielectron). 

You might read, for example, a biochemist's journey with the biotechnology CRISPR-Cas9 in which they chronicle their real-time groundbreaking progress in human-gene editing. Or, you might tag along on a physicist's journey of conducting research at the nexus of nanotechnology and regenerative medicine.

Why confine yourself to science- and research-related topics, though, when history books can be equally enthralling? 

As opposed to the monotonous lectures whose sole purpose is to ready you for quizzes on arbitrary facts, you might find, for example, it interesting that the founding fathers—Washington, Jefferson, Adams, and Madison—actually led double lives as gardeners in the late-17th and early-18th centuries. Or, maybe you follow along on a 19th-century physician and botanist's whereabouts in New York City—dirt roads NYC, that is—and New Jersey, where he was attending to a deathly Alexander Hamilton by morning and teaching students by afternoon. 

Still, other thrills abound, such as  the treatise on the founding of the U.S. Navy and America's struggle to defend its Atlantic seaboard from British blockades; if that doesn’t float your boat, maybe the sorrows of the years leading up to Civil War would be more engrossing.

Read what you enjoy and enjoy reading

Find what you enjoy and read about it. My commentary above is more about what I like to read, so it's certainly limited in scope and taste. But, through introspection, meditation, reflection, or whatever it takes, you can find what you're interested in, since books are more than “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” and “Fahrenheit 451.” 

Reading can be about learning the history of the U.S.  and the world; it can be the biographies of famous people or your idols. Books are, in fact, the important history of your culture and ancestors, whose stories would otherwise be lost in the ages-old, never-ending, existing-since-the-beginning-of-time political warfare.

Reading can also be about many other things, and is, fundamentally, a process of exploration. It’s ok not to know where to start—whether because everything is interesting, or because nothing is interesting. Sometimes it takes a stroll through a bookstore (when it’s safe to do so) to find something that piques your interest. Other times it’s reading a new bestseller, or finding out that your favorite celebrity, journalist, or news anchor is also an author!
Above all, reading is a coping mechanism, so let it come naturally. The point is finding something you want to read, so that you can become lost in its whirlwind rather than the one we’re in right now.