Most academic writers are regular readers. There is of course a strong connection between reading and writing. Reading and writing feed each other. But I’m not focused on the connection right now. No, I’m thinking about how hard we often find it to prioritise time for reading. And how maybe the reality is that most academic writers want to be more regular in their reading. We want to get further through the pile of papers and books that sit temptingly on our desks, shelves and in online files.

I’ve been wondering if we take the fact of unread papers and books too much for granted. Like taxes, the unread is always with us, an unwelcome fact of academic life. This is not just an individual problem, a sign of our inadequacy. Our colleagues have the unread too and we’re not surprised to see and hear them mention their unread. Are we just too accepting of the unread? Why do we put up with this situation? After all our teaching and research, as well as our writing, depend on reading.

And despite the unread, we are always making reference to papers and books – we publicise our own, congratulate our friends on their publications, and recommend and review books in our field to our students. And yes sometimes we do have academic reading groups and journal clubs.

But what about our own reading lists? How much do we get to focus on just our own idiosyncratic reading? What about the reading that isn’t associated with a project or course? Reading just for reading’s sake. Reading to get informed. Reading to be enriched, stimulated, challenged and excited by…

I wonder how often we ask our colleagues what they are reading at the moment, the books that influenced them most, the book they wish they’d written, the book they are ashamed not to have read, the book they couldn’t finish, the book they always give as a gift. And at the end of term, do we share our must-read academic books or compile a shared list to read over summer?

I’m interested in what people read, and wonder why I don’t seem to have more writer-reader conversations. So I decided to have a bit of a play to see what I don’t often talk about.

What are you stalled on reading and wish you could finish?

This is a big list. So many half read books. When I started to look there were just too many to list. So here’s the first two I saw.

I’m half way through Mieke Bal’s (2002) Travelling concepts in the humanities. A rough guide (U of Toronto Press), which should help me to get somewhere in thinking about inter/trans/multi-disciplinary work. But I’ve stalled, I’ve let other things take over.

I’ve also been dipping in and out of Laura Micchiche’s (2017) Acknowledging writing partners (University Press of Colorado, Boulder) which I first bought because it had a chapter on writing with animal companions. With pictures. And graphs! But it is of course more than that and I do like her conclusion that writing has an “exuberant vitality” despite its “performative struggles”, leaves us with a “completion afterglow”. But Im sure I could get much more out of it if I stopped toe-dipping and started diving deep.

What unread book do you really want to get into?

Too many here but for starters here’s two.

John McPhee (2017) Draft no 4. On the writing process. The Text Publishing Company. The book seems to be a lot about structuring writing. And working out your structural patterns through drawing. Not imposing a structure on the materials. I’m hoping this book will help me say something more about how not to do the default social science argument or the standard research report. When I get to it that is.

And the other is Paula Marantz Cohen (2023) Talking cure. An essay on the civilising power of conversation. Princeton University Press. The introduction provides a rationale which resonated strongly with me.

In past eras, daily life made it necessary for individuals to engage with others different from themselves. Families were larger and more extended rather than small and closed, and so people were often in contact with cousins and more distant relatives of the sort we see now only at Thanksgiving or know about through Ancestry.com. It’s true that pronounced ethnic, religious, and class barriers kept various groups apart from each other in unjustly prescribed ways. Nonetheless, the serendipity of having to move around in literal space created unpredictable encounters. People were forced to engage with others in order to carry on the business of their lives. That element of serendipity has now diminished. For all our espousal of difference and diversity, we have become a nation of factions and tribes, our thinking, in so many instances, hardened into repetitive patterns of agreement or opposition. The rise of social media, while it provides access to people in far-flung places, also supports a narrow sectarianism of ideas and feeds mockery and mean-spiritedness.

I’m hoping Marantz’s book provides rich discussion and perhaps some examples of how and where lack of conversation problems might be ameliorated.

There are more unread and book questions I could ask and answer of course. Which book have I put down and won’t pick up again? Which books do I most often recommend to students? What books influenced me most? If I had to choose only one book to keep what would it be and why? What books are likely to stay unread?

I’m sure you can think of other questions.

But perhaps the key point here is the very existence of the unread. And how we can reduce the unread to a smaller pile… and whether more book oriented conversations would help.