In the second year of my Arts degree at the University of Queensland, I took a critical theory course from which I remember only two details (I did not do well). The first is the lecturer gesturing towards an image of a glaring, turtlenecked Foucault and describing the philosopher as being present ‘in all his sartorial glory’. The second is a piece of wisdom delivered by my tutor, a perpetually beleaguered wild-bearded PhD candidate who, at the time, seemed sagaciously ageless but, looking back, was probably 24. Responding to a student who had asked what he liked to read, the tutor avuncularly explained that since beginning his postgraduate career he’d read nothing for pleasure.

Ten years later, weeks from submitting my own doctoral thesis, I find that I can read only for pleasure. This is a relief, because the tutor’s conviction that grad school made this impossible had so shaped my expectations that I’d perversely prepared, in exchange for undertaking the project, to trade in the delights that books have always provided. Now, I can say that the best thing I’ve learnt as a literature postgraduate is that the emotional attachments we form with books aren’t distractions from their proper study, but rather part of the study itself, invitations to proclaim their worth.