On reading

I watched a man reading a novel all the way from Plymouth to Reading the other day, turning the pages as the blackness of a winter afternoon sped by the train windows. Admirable, I thought. As he got up to leave I saw the book was a killer-thriller. Ah well, at least he was reading.
Whoops. Am I becoming a snob? I don't think so though. I often love a good thriller myself, but the act of reading has become something like frontline action in trench warfare. Reading is research. I dart into a text, find what I need, then run out again. I'm in search of nuggets of information to bring my own new novel to life. As the story ranges beyond the scope of my immediate interests, I set the book down and move on.
Teaching creative writing enforces a peculiar kind of zealous reading. From mid-January into February I'm set to read 321,000 words of new fiction - closely, marking the texts, plus 75 pages of my own written reports - as the next weight of student marking slams onto my desk. In addition, teaching published texts renders me, perforce, a patient reader - it takes me about four times as long to read a book, working out how to teach it, filling the margins with notes, pausing and retreating when I've grown tired and skipped the meaning of a paragraph. I'm limiting myself to three such texts over Christmas. My pleasure in Richard Holmes's Footsteps has become diluted. On my own, having snaffled his recreation of R.L.Stevenson's travels with a donkey, I'd have tired now and put it down. I wilted when asked to become fascinated by the love correspondence of Mary Wollstonecraft among the post-revolutionary barricades of Paris. It seems like an esoteric form of celebrity gossip, Britney Spears for intellectuals. I'm fine with celebrity gossip but not just now please, I'm busy, there are more important things going on in the world.
I'll delight in the book again, I'm sure, it's an engaging read with lots I could do with knowing. I'm simply tired. I'm off to France on Saturday so the book can gain an extra dimension by being read in situ.
Last night I surprised myself, picked up a novel (Joseph Olshan's In Clara's Hands) and simply read away past bedtime. Phew. Reading-magic, reading for pleasure, is still out there.