Like many, most, who contribute to this blog, I read professionally, which is to say, I read a lot of emails. Things I’m not reading: political coverage (just for a bit longer, please, a bit longer). Twitter, when I can possibly avoid it (I could certainly avoid it more). Traffic signs (I cross where I please). My open tabs (to be closed en masse, unread, in a cleansing end-of-year ritual). Downloaded early-childhood-development PDFs (kids grow quick; who can keep up?). Not as many books as you might think. More, things on the way to being books: manuscripts, proposals, inchoate musings. For years I’ve kept a list of the books and manuscripts I’ve read to the end at the back of my week-to-week diary, with an asterisk next to those read outside the auspices of work. In 2018 they numbered a pitiful three.

It’s standard industry small talk to ask colleagues what, or if, they’re reading for ‘fun’—which isn’t to say that what we’re reading in the course of our work is not good or pleasurable (it is!), but that the experience of reading is inevitably coloured by the work: the vulgar-but-necessary assessment for the market pre-acquisition; the hunt for repeated words and infelicities; the simple truth of capitalism that being paid to do something takes it out of the realm of enjoyment and into the world of obligation and debt.