I’ve been listening to a few literature podcasts during my commute but most of them feel pretty shallow. What are the genuinely good ones worth following?
@mateolit Being completely honest, the English degree has been more practically useful in my career than I expected it to be. Not because any employer has ever cared about my specific opinions on Chaucer or my thesis on Victorian poetry, but because I can write clearly under pressure, think critically about complex arguments, read carefully and identify what matters in dense documents, and construct persuasive cases. Those transferable skills are valuable in marketing, law, consulting, education, journalism, tech writing, and basically any professional field that involves communication.
Related to that, the e-reader versus print book debate is completely settled in my mind, and the answer is both depending on context. Physical print books for anything I need to study closely, annotate, or flip back and forth through for an essay. E-reader for everything else – leisure reading, travel reading, and the enormous convenience of carrying an entire library in something that weighs less than a single paperback. Research consistently shows better retention with physical books for academic purposes, so I don’t fight that.
Story time: I’m currently reading Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel and it’s exactly what I needed after a heavy, reading-intensive semester. It’s literary fiction that is genuinely compelling as a story, not just as a vehicle for themes. The way it weaves between timelines is masterful without ever becoming confusing. Highly recommend if you want something that’s thoughtful and well-crafted but not exhausting to read.
Related to that, imposter syndrome in literature seminars is incredibly common and almost universal in my experience. The students who seem like they’ve read absolutely everything and can effortlessly reference obscure theorists are usually just very good at strategically referencing the few things they have read. Nobody has read everything. And the ones who confidently name-drop Deleuze and Derrida in every class discussion are often significantly less insightful than the quiet student who has a genuine, carefully thought-through, personal response to the actual text being discussed.
Story time: My unpopular literature opinion that I’ll defend to anyone: short stories are a more impressive and demanding art form than novels. The severe constraints of the short story form demand a precision, economy, and intentionality that novelists can afford to lack. Every single word in a truly great short story is structurally load-bearing. Novels have hundreds of pages of room for self-indulgence, tangents, and padding. A perfect short story has nowhere to hide.
Adding to this, how I found my favorite author is actually a great icebreaker question that reveals a lot about how people relate to literature. For me, it was a professor’s completely offhand, throwaway comment during a lecture on something else entirely. She mentioned this writer as a brief aside, said something like ‘if you haven’t read their work yet, you’re genuinely missing out,’ and I went directly to the campus library that afternoon on a whim. Sometimes the best literary recommendations come from people who aren’t consciously trying to recommend anything at all.
The claim that close reading is dying in modern education is overstated but not entirely wrong. Close reading as a disciplined practice isn’t disappearing, but it is competing with other legitimate modes of intellectual engagement for students’ time and attention. Students today are often excellent at synthesis, creative connection-making, and recognizing patterns across multiple texts. What they sometimes lack is the patience and training for sustained, deep attention to a single passage’s language and mechanics. Both skill sets genuinely matter.
While we’re on this topic, the key to balancing reading for pleasure and reading for class is keeping the two activities completely separate in your mind and your physical space. I have a strict personal rule: class reading happens at my desk with notes, highlighters, and my laptop open. Pleasure reading happens in bed, on the couch, or in a coffee shop with absolutely no notebook in sight. Physically separating the activities into different contexts helps me genuinely enjoy both.