The Year I Quit Reading

How Academia Poisoned My Love of Literature—And How I Got It Back

You may know me as “the bookworm.” Indeed, when I’m not working, I’m either plotting out my next great creative project, writing articles for Substack, or reading books. I’ve read about 1,000 books over the first three decades of my life (according to my Goodreads, at least), and when I’m not physically reading, I have the audiobook version of my current favorite novel playing in the shower or accompanying me to the gym. Reading has been my sanity since elementary school, my escape from the drudgery of real life, my intellectual development in a world plagued by folly. Reading has been my savior—and always will be.

Yet in 2021, I read zero books.

You might think I’m joking—or wonder how that’s possible for someone who routinely carps about the decline of reading in our society and casts a somewhat judgmental eye at those unfamiliar with the likes of Shakespeare or Dickens. This might even make me a hypocrite, and I’m certainly not proud of the year in which I did not read. Nevertheless, 2021—the year I quit reading—was an important year in my intellectual development because it showed me what really mattered.

Let’s backtrack for a moment.

2020 is a special year for us all because it is, perhaps, the only year that will ever mean the same thing to the eight billion different people who lived through it. For me, however, 2020 was the unfortunate year that I earned my MA in English literature from Columbia University—and graduated with a burning hatred for the literary world. I was jaded, exhausted, and, frankly, appalled that I had ever associated with the literary crowd. Coming out of Columbia with the unexpected (at least, to my friends and family) resolution not to continue my graduate studies and secure my PhD in literature—my lifelong dream since perhaps the age of three—I was determined to lead a life as far removed from the literary world as humanly possible. At 22, I had met my fair share of people on the planet, yet none had so deeply wounded me as my English professors and my peers in my English cohort. There was something wrong with human beings who studied literature, I concluded, and if I had wanted to devote my life to literature it was only, I supposed, from the folly of youth, from a lack of understanding of where I belonged in the world. I was only seventeen, after all, when I had decided that I would devote my life to literature—and I knew nothing about what that world was like. Five years later, indeed, I was convinced that I had made a grave error in my path. Literature was for the weak-minded. Literature was for nasty, disillusioned people who were incapable of providing meaningful contributions to society. Literature was people who could not actually write, people who cloaked their anti-intellectualism in obscurantist jargon and meaningless sentences. Literature was for people who did not understand the world.

At least, the way that these people “did” literature had me believing so.

As a teenager, I had always envisioned myself as an intellectual scholar, a Renaissance woman who, standing at the crossroads of literature, art, philosophy, and music, would restore a one-time cultural flourishing to Western society. To me, literature was not simply a more elevated mode of writing through which we could understand ourselves—though, certainly, I cherished this component of it as well—it was a cornerstone of human potential for cultural development. Reading Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, I understood that literature could not operate in isolation, could not be studied without a robust understanding of the other artistic and humanistic disciplines that comprise Western civilization, and I was especially enamored by literature’s unique relationship to music, which I viewed as an extension of the human soul. Literature was important to me because it was a unique creative proxy for the existence of a societal tradition that made us human.

How could I have been prepared, then, matriculating at one of the nation’s premier institutes that supposedly boasted of adherence to the Western cultural tradition—a university that was so steeped in the paideia of Ancient Greek society that it mandated a physical education course in keeping with the Athenian doctrine of “strong body, strong mind”—for a department that wanted nothing more than to obliterate centuries of tradition through noxious ideology?

How can I tell you how many times I grew tired of the phrase "X author was a racist” coming out of my professors’ mouths? How can I express how painful it was to hear my lifelong idols denigrated for their views, for their improper uses of the word “retarded”—which in the nineteenth century was simply a stand-in for “slow” and did not carry the connotation it does today—or the other one I am not allowed to say here, which Twain employs quite often in Huck Finn? Would these authors have even lifted their pens had they known that hundreds of years down the line, some ill-starred virago—turning her nose up at tormented students scuttling across the Columbia greenery from her ivory tower—would lambast their great works that she would never be capable of competing with or understanding? Here was the greatest English poet on earth—William Shakespeare—and we were only allowed to read him after a series of disclaimers that his work contained sexist, ableist, racist, homophobic etc. etc. language. Has it crossed your mind, sirs and madams of the Columbia English department, that the sheer ludicrousness inherent in your censorship of the great Bard might be leading an increasing number of young literary scholars away from the love of Shakespeare?

But maybe that was just the point.

Instead of appreciating the great works of literature in their entirety—in their flaws and worldviews that differed so greatly from 21st century prescriptions—Columbia students and professors alike seemed to have made it their mission to put down the great writers of the Western canon to prevent future generations from enjoying them—and simply because of their skin color or certain so-called “backwards” views that they held. And, if on the rare occasion, you were allowed to enjoy Shakespeare and his brilliant company of poetic masterminds, you could only do so through the lenses of Marxist, postcolonial, or gender theory. In my English classes at Columbia, we read literature not because of its unique place in the Western tradition—we read literature to critique the capitalist machine or identify inherent biases in contemporary society. But I was not an economist or a sociologist. I was a scholar of literature! I wanted to read literature because literature made us human!

Well. We couldn't have that in the academy.

Five years since I made the ill-fated decision to abandon my studies of English literature, fed up with yet another abortive argument about the merits of Chaucer or Milton (radical progressives, both of them, by the standards of their time, by the way!), I am not sure I would go back and force 2021 Liza to continue immersing herself in the literary world. The decision was perfectly justified for someone who received so much pushback for the claim that Shakespeare was simply more worthwhile than James Baldwin or Toni Morrison that she was left questioning whether Shakespeare really was so great—and that cognitive dissonance, you might imagine, did not sit well with someone who aspired to devote her life to the study of literature. And the more I began to question the value of these timeless authors, the more confused I became—the “real world” outside of the academy still seemed to value these great authors without the sort of caveats that my peers and professors ascribed to them. Yet caught up in the academy, convinced that these people were the prime authorities on literary study, I was both disillusioned and terrified. What if classic literature held no relation to the societal tradition that I had always cherished? What if it really was just a playground for far-leftists to chase each other through with pitchforks and knives, destroying centuries of tradition like a bully overturning a sandcastle erected by a toddler?

So putting the finishing touches on my MA thesis in May 2020, shutting my volume of T.S. Eliot poems, I would scarcely touch a book for the next sixteen months. I simply couldn't do it anymore. Books had been poisoned for me. I would open Howards End and immediately start to conceptualize what sort of Marxist reading I could do of Leonard Bast and the Schlegel sisters. I would read Heart of Darkness and think only of Edward Said’s postcolonial theory. I would page through Brideshead Revisited and be keenly aware of the queer undertones in Sebastian’s quips. Indeed, these were all books I read in the last days of 2020, when I resolved to push through what I had been taught about literature at Columbia and enjoy books the way I had back in high school, when I read for the unique insights that these works provided us into the human condition. I still remember the agony I felt at being able to consume these great works only through the cynical, vivisectional lenses I had been sold at Columbia, and I could not take it anymore.

And so I stopped reading—for reading had begun to wound my soul.

Maybe I needed the break. Maybe I needed to distance myself from the fraught and pretentious world of intellectualism. And as I stopped interacting with the people who would glare at you with a look of unadulterated scorn for not knowing about Levinas’ contribution to the phenomenological movement, I realized that most people in the ordinary universe did not really read. And, indeed, I was initially taken aback during my brief sojourn in corporate America when I realized that—forget Levinas—most people had never even heard of Hegel or Joyce. And these people were perfectly all right. In fact, they seemed to enjoy life—an occurrence that, given my five years of combatting deeply unhappy professors and vicious students of English literature, I initially had trouble comprehending.

By the fall of 2020, I was working in advertising and learning to navigate the normal world. For a moment, I thought I had found my place, but something was not right here either. My manager would scoff at the vocabulary I had inadvertently snuck into the copy of our latest product, insisting that I simplify the text for the general populace, and I was lousy at writing the sort of catchy, unembellished sentences that were required for my copywriting job. So I quit after about six weeks and transitioned to editing essays for high school students’ college applications, where I could at least put my writing skills to use. I am sure that reading terrible essays for a year without accessing great literature temporarily stunted the development of my own writing voice, yet when I soon founded a company devoted to college counseling, I accidentally fell into the position of financial stability—not a circumstance I had ever expected to enjoy with my two English degrees—and, curiously enough, having the luxury of not worrying about how I was going to afford my rent for the next month gave me access to the nebulous world of the leisure class. In early 2022, I finally had time to think.

Initially, I spent my free time building out both my New York social circle and the growth plan for my company. I was so invested in the company, in fact, that I felt I did not have time to read, and between running errands, working out, and cooking, I was so busy that I didn’t know how I had ever found time to read in the first place.

Around that time, my boyfriend got me very into classic rock, and I discovered a renewed love for the likes of The Beatles, Pink Floyd, and David Bowie, artists who my dad had listened to when I was growing up but that I had never truly explored myself. In early 2022, I made it my mission to listen to every single Bowie album and was on his sixth studio album, Aladdin Sane, when I opened the Wikipedia page to the album’s title track and stumbled upon the following notable sentence: “The subject matter was inspired by a book he was reading, Evelyn Waugh's 1930 book Vile Bodies.”

Evelyn Waugh, I thought! The author of Brideshead Revisited, the last book I had read about a year back when all I could think about was the queer dynamic between Charles and Sebastian. And then, listening to that one Bowie song, it all came back to me—literature’s relationship to music and its unique place in the cultural tradition. The next morning, I rushed over to The Strand to pick up a copy of Vile Bodies and every other Waugh novel in stock. Finishing the book in several days, I felt I had enriched both my understanding of Bowie’s work and my existing literary acumen. Having distanced myself from the literary ideologues I had so detested at Columbia, I was no longer plagued by Marxism and postcolonialism. I was cured! I could read again!

From there, I devoured the Waugh corpus. I read a broad array of novels and plays and short stories and novellas and sprinkled a few nonfiction books in between. And though I sometimes remembered the narrow-minded ideologies I had been fed at Columbia in an occasional unsolicited déjà vu moment, I promptly spat them out again and kept on reading. By the end of the year, I had rekindled my love of literature and discovered many under-appreciated gems in the process—books that would never have appeared on a literature syllabus at Columbia. By early 2024, I knew I had to make it my mission to save literature so that no other lovers of the cultural tradition of the West would ever suffer like I had. So Pens and Poison was born.

Today, Columbia students continue to rage against the literary tradition, publishing articles that insist that the presence of only two black authors in a Western literature survey course is a sign of systemic racism in our society. But today, I no longer cower before them; rather, I pity them. These are students who will, indeed, read the great works of the Western literary tradition but who are unlikely to truly understand them. Taught that literature was written by racist white men and that, therefore, they should only interpret it through our contemporary myopic lenses, these students will never experience the intellectual joy I felt that one afternoon upon discovering that Aladdin Sane is a musical retelling of Waugh’s Vile Bodies—they will never know what it is like to find cultural connections that point to the importance of the literary tradition in our society, a tradition that, indeed, informs all aspects of human life.

And if the year I quit reading taught me anything, it’s that everything is salvageable; my reading habits may have temporarily stagnated, but my literary soul never left me—it simply lay dormant, waiting for that one inspired moment that would bring everything back. And I would not trade that sole moment of intellectual reawakening for anything in the world.

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