Seasonal reads: On childhood hobbies, growing up, and guilt

Reconnecting with reading is something many people tend to do on a summer holiday, and statistics suggest it is one of the only times the majority of  adults read throughout the year. WalesOnline reports that 25% of its 5,000 respondents only ever read whilst away on holiday. Perhaps more interestingly, it reports that, whilst 29% of people would be too embarrassed to be seen reading romance in their day-to-day life, 17% change their mind when they are away on holiday. Although it feels like a societal issue that people would be too self-conscious to read romance in public (perhaps because it is a genre enjoyed by more women than men), this speaks to how much further from their regular selves people feel whilst on holiday.

It seems that many people find summer holidays to be a time in which they can disconnect from their real lives and read things they would usually feel too self-conscious to. This same study reveals that over half of adults wish they read more, implying that not everyone manages to crack open a book whilst on holiday. The study reports that the average number of books read on holiday is 2.3, but it does not say how widely the results ranged. Given that over half of people wish they read more, it is quite possible that, rather than a lot of people reading two or three books each, many read none at all and others read copious amounts.

I personally find this to be the case. Every summer holiday, reading for pleasure is something I either nostalgically reconnect with or grow ever more distant from and feel guilty whilst doing so. I will spend a week either reading a similarly obscene number of novels to what I consistently read as a child, or not once broaching the first page, and pre-holiday it is impossible for me to predict which will occur. For more self-aware readers, perhaps this is not such a surprising phenomenon, but I find each time I am surprised either by the large amount of my to-be-read list I’ve suddenly ticked off, or by the fact that the most words I consumed were on a restaurant menu.

You might assume that, since this article is in the Books section of Cherwell, I am about to try to convince you that you should have spent your summer reigniting your childhood passion for reading. It is not an uncommon pipeline for someone who is nerd enough to get into the University of Oxford to have greatly enjoyed reading as a child, only to arrive here and have reading become their entire life. This, for many, leads not necessarily to falling out of love with reading, but perhaps to a reading fatigue that makes us increasingly reluctant to spend our precious free time with our nose in a book.

I know many people who at least somewhat mourn the more casual relationship they had with reading as a child. One thing that categorically never encourages a reignition of a love for casual reading, however, is guilt. At no point has a nostalgic childhood hobby been happily rediscovered through guilt. I also think that, for many people, guilt is a feeling associated specifically with reading for fun. It’s almost like many people who grew up with a love of reading also developed a need for academic achievement to such an extent that this would be carried into adulthood hobbies.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines a hobby as “an activity or interest pursued regularly in one’s leisure time for pleasure”. Unfortunately, when it comes to reading, many people seem to forget the final two words of this definition. So, ultimately, guilt seems to be almost exclusively applied to reading as a hobby, in a way that is damaging to our enjoyment of it. Reading seems to be the one hobby that causes people to forget what the purpose of a hobby actually is: pleasure. If you’re no longer wanting to read for pleasure, that’s not something that should be forced. I’ve watched people obsess over reaching arbitrary reading goals in a way that prevents their hobby from matching its definition.

In my opinion, as long as you’ve replaced it with other hobbies rather than an alarming screen time, falling out of love with reading is not something to be ashamed of, and it shouldn’t be a hobby forced out of some misplaced sense of guilt. The pause doesn’t have to be permanent, and perhaps not forcing it will allow it to come back naturally (as well as leaving a part of our lives in which reading comprises alarming amounts of our time).