I know there’s research showing better retention with physical books, but e-readers are so much more convenient. What do you prefer for serious literary study?
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.
One more thought on this. bookTok and similar social media book communities have been a net positive for reading culture overall, even if the literary discussions on those platforms tend to be pretty shallow and focused on aesthetics over substance. Getting millions of young people genuinely excited about reading books and buying books and talking about books is worth more to literary culture than sophisticated academic analysis that reaches a few hundred people. The depth of engagement can develop over time. First you need people to pick up books in the first place.
I discovered my all-time favorite author completely by accident through a used bookstore. I was killing time between classes one afternoon, browsing randomly, and picked up a battered copy of a novel I’d never heard of purely because the first page grabbed me immediately. I bought it for two dollars, read it in a single sitting that evening, and that author has been my favorite ever since. There’s something irreplaceable and magical about discovering writers completely organically, without the influence of reviews, algorithms, or bestseller lists.
To add a different angle, 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.
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.
Along those lines, i take notes while reading using a system of colored adhesive tabs instead of writing directly in the books. Blue tab for key themes I want to track, yellow for important quotes I might want to cite or reference, red for passages I want to analyze more deeply, green for things I disagree with or find genuinely confusing. After finishing the book, I go through all the tabs and make a summary document on my computer. It’s quick to do while reading, doesn’t interrupt the reading flow at all, and gives me a searchable reference later. Ask me again after my third coffee.
The best literature podcast I’ve found after trying dozens is the New York Review of Books podcast. The conversations between writers, critics, and scholars are genuinely intellectual and illuminating without ever becoming pretentious or exclusionary. They cover an impressively wide range of authors, traditions, and literary periods. For something more accessible and entertaining, the older episodes of Thug Notes on YouTube do genuinely excellent analytical breakdowns of classic literature in a very engaging, unpretentious style.
Another thing worth mentioning: 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.