It feels like fewer students are being taught to truly sit with a text and analyze it line by line. Is close reading becoming a lost art or am I being nostalgic?
The best practical preparation for the reading demands of graduate school isn’t reading more books right now. It’s developing two distinct reading strategies and knowing when to deploy each one. Speed reading techniques for contextual, non-essential texts where you need the gist and the main argument quickly. Deep, slow, annotated reading techniques for the essential primary and theoretical texts that are central to your research.
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.
I’ll also say this: 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.
I organize my personal library by a system I affectionately call ‘vibes’ and I refuse to apologize for it. Fiction is separated into roughly four zones: dark and emotionally heavy, light and fun, experimental and formally weird, and comfort rereads that I return to regularly. Non-fiction is organized by broad topic area. It makes absolutely no alphabetical or Dewey Decimal sense, but I can always find exactly what I’m in the mood to read next, which is the actual functional point of organizing books for a personal collection.
While we’re on this topic, 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.
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.
The flip side of that: 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.
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.
Another thing worth mentioning: 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.
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.
Related to that, 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.
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.
The flip side of that: 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.
Oh this is such a good topic! 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.
The flip side of that: the best practical preparation for the reading demands of graduate school isn’t reading more books right now. It’s developing two distinct reading strategies and knowing when to deploy each one. Speed reading techniques for contextual, non-essential texts where you need the gist and the main argument quickly. Deep, slow, annotated reading techniques for the essential primary and theoretical texts that are central to your research. You simply cannot closely read everything assigned in grad school – there’s far too much. Learning to triage and allocate your reading attention effectively is every bit as important as learning to analyze deeply.