Reading books for fun

After finally submitting my PhD thesis earlier this year, I finally had a chance to rediscover an old passion of mine: reading books for fun.

Reading is something I do every day, but I stopped reading books for fun a long time ago. I certainly didn't stop reading books, and I certainly didn't stop reading for fun, but I only read books when I had to, i.e. for school.

I read a lot of books in my childhood, and it wasn't necessarily because I liked books. When I was a kid, my parents didn't let me and me (and my sister) watch TV on weekdays. Because we are assigned so little homework in Canada, and because I wasn't particularly interested in sports at that time, I had a lot of spare time on my hands. So to kill the time, I read books. Lots of books. I would either borrow books from the school library or from the public library, and I also got books from my dad's bookshelves. I even read a lot of books that I couldn't even understand. But by doing so, I pushed the boundaries of my knowledge and improved my abilities in reading and writing. More so than most other kids, I could read quickly, write well, and I became a repository of obscure trivial knowledge. Sadly, this also served to reinforced my image as a nerdy kid, which didn't really help my social life.

In high school, reading books actually meant more freedom for me. My parents were a bit reluctant to let me go out on my own, but it was hard for them to say no to letting me go to the library. So in addition to going ice skating with girls, riding my bike with my brother, and hanging out at the mall with my best friend Keith, I also rode my bike to the Richmond Public Library. By grade 9, I started to take the bus to the Vancouver Public Library, and by grade 11, I started to ride there, a 25km ride. The fact that I wasn't an outstanding student in high school probably has something to do with the fact that I spent a lot more time reading books for fun than I did on my school work.


When I got to university, especially when I was doing my Masters degree, I was required to do a lot more reading than ever. But unlike in high school, I got to choose my courseload. I took a lot of courses in History, Geography, Economics, and the Political Sciences simply because I was genuinely interested in those subjects. However, I must say that reading and analyzing books for exams and assignments is very different from reading books for fun. First of all, when we read for fun, we can take away as much or as little as we want from what we read; when we read as part of an assignment, we must fulfill expectations by looking for specific things. Also, reading academic writing is generally not fun.


Sometime in the past decade, I became a full-fledged news junkie. No matter how busy I am, I set aside at least one or two hours each day to read at least one or two (but usually half a dozen) newspapers; on the weekends, I read magazines too. Reading the New York Times is as essential a part of my day as brushing my teeth and eating lunch. I'm not sure when I crossed the line between healthy habit to addiction. I also don't know if addiction also counts as fun, but for argument's sake, let's say that I read newspapers and magazines for fun.


Now that I think of it, I can think of some of the differences between reading books and articles. For one thing, it takes more commitment to read a book than an article. Even the 10,000 word articles in magazines like The New Yorker and The Atlantic (formerly The Atlantic Monthly) take around 1 hour to read, whereas books take at least several hours to read, and usually cannot be finished in one sitting. You have to be pretty interested in a topic in order to finish a whole book on it. For example, I recently borrowed biographies of George F. Kennan and Winston Churchill, the autobiography of Christopher Hitchens, and the memoirs of Zhao Ziyang, but have yet to get through 2 chapters of each of them. By contrast, I've had no problem reading length book reviews and article-length publications on the very same subjects.



After submitting my PhD thesis in April, I've had a lot more free time on my hands. More importantly, I've finally been able to free my mind of my thesis (at least for a while), allowing me the peace of mind to read books for fun. I did read for fun while writing my thesis, but never books. If I knew that I had to read 10-20 journal articles in a month, what's the harm of reading a few magazine articles for fun? But to read a book is a different story. It's not that I have absolutely nothing to do - these days, I've been preparing to defend my thesis, and I've also been looking for a job, but these things aren't as all-consuming as writing a PhD thesis is.



So what have I been reading? There are lots of books that I've been meaning to read over the years, and I heard of most of them from the New York Times Sunday book review section. Books like Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by the husband-wife team of Nicolas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn; In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan; God is Not Great and Hitch 22 by Christopher Hitchens; Born Round by Frank Bruni; and A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa by Howard W. French, are books that were written by journalists whom I'd admired. Because I've enjoyed reading their work, I entrust them with the task of shedding more light on topics like gender issues, food, and neo-colonialism. Then, there are books like Eaarth by Bill McKibben and The Revenge on Gaia by James Lovelock, books that are about the environment. Though I wouldn't necessarily call myself an environmentalist, I think it's important to understand what's happening to Earth. To tell you the truth, I haven't read a single page of either book. As I mentioned earlier, I also borrowed biographies of George F. Kennan and Winston Churchill, as well as The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War by Nicolas Thompson. I haven't touched these books either.

It seems that I have a thing for books about China, especially books written by China watchers who are not from China. These are the books that I couldn't put down. The first book I read after submitting my thesis was Factory Girls by Leslie T. Chang, a Taiwanese-American journalist. After that, I read Oracle Bones: A Journey through Time in China by her husband Peter Hessler, who also became a journalist after working in China as a US Peace Corps volunteer - he's my new hero, by the way. Then, I read River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze and Country Driving: A Journey through China from Farm to Factory to round out the Peter Hessler trilogy. After that, I read the very disturbing Poorly Made in China: An Insider's Account of the Tactics behind China's Production Game by Paul Midler. Then, I read China Underground by Zachary Mexico, which describes the seedier sides of China. I recommend all of these books, especially the books by Peter Hessler.

Pretty soon (though I'm not sure when), I will have to start working. Between a full-time job, exercise, news addiction, and keeping a girlfriend happy, I'm not sure how much time and mental energy I can spare to reading books for pleasure. I hope I don't have to wait until retirement to be able to read books for pleasure again.