One of the afflictions of being an English teacher is that some people expect me to disapprove of other people’s reading choices. In fact, they expect me to disapprove of a lot of things, including other people’s grammar, handwriting, usage, punctuation, and verbal tics. I have a great deal of difficulty being polite to those people. Before I was an English teacher, I was a science teacher, and I had a lot more reason to disapprove of people’s beliefs about viruses, the phases of the moon, or the fact that there is gravity in space. I didn’t disapprove of those, either, I just entertained my students with the wonderful ways in which reality is weirder than they can imagine.

My own reading habits are not particularly elevated. I read a lot on the Internet, as many of us do, including a lot of drivel and slop, but also random long articles about things such as etymology, memory, and fountain pens, because on the Internet I am like a cat glimpsing any number of birds and racing after them. I glance at a number of newspapers online, too, and then escape them with a shudder. Recently, I found out that the Pressreader app will allow me to read print editions of The New York Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer plus a number of magazines, which solves the periodic problem I have of unsubscribing to things, and then following a link to something that’s actually interesting, but not being able to read it because it’s restricted to subscribers.

Last month I re-read a 30-book mystery series; I say “re-read” but I don’t remember much about reading them in the first place because (a) it was twenty years ago (b) I don’t remember much of what I read (c) I read in gulps, out of order, and with periodic inattention. Most people don’t remember most of what they read, you know, despite the persistent myth that they do. They don’t remember most of what they hear, either. They mostly learn by repeated exposure, and by acting on what they have heard and read. Anyway, reading the thirty books was not an exercise in edification; I was mostly doing it to avoid reality. All my life, reading has been either a method of escape from reality, or a method of figuring out reality.

Now I’m on a new series recommended by a friend, Andrea Camillieri’s Inspector Montalbano mysteries. I finished the second book in the series. It was hilarious and somehow not dispiriting despite profound cynicism and a devious and difficult protagonist. Right up my alley.

Yesterday, I also finished a book titled Tidying the Abyss, about keeping your house organized and clean when you just can’t handle anything. That was also a pleasure-read; I like reading books about getting organized, even though my house is bizarrely organized and tidy. The book was sweet and encouraging; I will not take most of the advice in it, either because I cannot imagine doing any of it or because I already have a system in place to deal with the thing the author is addressing. I found it motivating, though. Sometimes I re-read Marie Kondo’s The Life-Saving Magic of Tidying Up because its world-view is bizarre and whimsical to the extreme. I read organizing books the way five-year-olds read about dinosaurs, you see.

When I am finished with a physical book, I usually put it in a neighbor’s Little Free Library. Kindle books, I don’t have to get rid of, though occasionally I will delete one if it’s egregiously bad. At some point all my Kindle books will vanish when Amazon decides to go whimsical on my ass, and I honestly don’t care.

I started reading a book about aphorisms, The World in a Phrase, once I finished the organization book. It is a happy book, full of brief biographies of eminent aphorists from Jesus (at least from the Gospel of St. Thomas in the Nag Hammadi manuscripts, disavowed by the early Church) to Zelenskyy. That sounds abstruse. It isn’t. I enjoy reading books by enthusiasts; heck, I even like reading books about grammar, partly because any informed enthusiast rapidly discovers that it isn’t as simple as grammar prudes would have you believe.

I used to keep track of my reading on Goodreads, but when it was acquired by Amazon I cast about for something less monopolistic and settled on The Storygraph. You can import all your Goodreads books into The Storygraph. That too will doubtless go the way of all online archives; the only really stable record of books would be one of those lovely old musty card files with the brass rods through them, but even then, fire and flood are possibilities. The main reason I keep track of my reading is to prevent a frequent problem I have, of buying books I have already read and don’t want to re-read. There’s nothing wrong with buying books I have already read, mind you. It’s the not-wanting-to-reread-them that is the problem. If I see that I have re-read a book and gave it a rating of 3.0 out of 5, I know not to try. That’s the lowest rating I give, you see, because I am a writer myself and while very low ratings are to be expected, they seem unnecessarily cruel to me.

And here you may notice the absence of great literature from my reading habits. I suppose aphorisms might count, but not a book about aphorisms by someone who thinks they are a lot of fun. No, despite having been an English teacher, I am not one of those people who believes in reading as a deep experience of human suffering. If a book’s reviewers exclaim that it was a profound examination of the problem of human evil, I tend to sidle away. I have read and loved many a fine classic, you see, but only when it was also entertaining. Moby Dick is a hoot. All of Franz Kafka is bizarre and amusing.

I was English department chair for six years, and the teachers I supervised, I fear, found me profoundly unsettling. So did many of the parents.

But my students adored me, and I taught them poetry, which most people avoid. Really good, difficult poetry. William Carlos Williams, Tennyson, Kay Ryan, the whole kit and caboodle. And yet I was happy if they wanted to read Captain Underpants or Jack Prelutsky. Because there is nothing, I repeat, nothing, bad about reading for entertainment, pleasure, escape, or information. We do not need to suffer any more than we already do, and I did not want my students to think of reading as bad-tasting medicine.

No, I do not disapprove of other people’s reading habits. You can go ahead and read novels in which people do gruesome and dreadful things to one another, the protagonist is awful, and everybody falls apart. I’m fine with that. I just don’t read many of those things myself, unless I’m reading history, in which case I usually have a mystery novel going at the same time to cleanse my palate.