I used to think I loved reading. But then I discovered that I didn't—not once I knew I had to say something smart about the books. Five years ago I could easily have reeled off my 10 favorite books set in London. It would have been a fun game. But these days, knowing that I have to craft those 10 books into a syllabus and tell a class of juniors at Princeton why they're all so important, the fun's over.

Once I know I'll be teaching a book, I just don't seem to be able to read it any more. I can't lose myself in its narrative, I can't believe passionately in the characters, I get skeptical about the big, fun themes, like forbidden love and destiny. Having to figure out what makes a book great causes me to fall out of love with it.

I think the students feel my pain. They keep asking me what I read for fun. Well, duh! I read fun books, of course. I'm sort of addicted to easy reads and airport fiction, and, yes, chick-lit—the great thing is to find a book that won't let me work out on it critically, where I can get all the way through without imagining how I'd teach it. It's the pleasure of the forbidden—books that are delicious because it's impossible to be smart about them.

But, as it happens, I have another answer to the question of what I read for fun. Which is that a different kind of fun comes from re-reading the books I teach, when I don't have to be clever. During the term, it's my job to interrogate Elizabeth's attraction to Mr. Darcy and Austen's representation of wealth working upon desire. In the summer, I can think that Mr. Darcy is hot and that Pemberley would be a fabulous place to live.

When I started to write a novel of my own, I planned at first to turn my back entirely on the serious business of teaching people lessons. I knew my book was going to be set in 18th-century London, the field of my academic specialization, only I was going to get my revenge on the 18th-century literature I taught: now there would be no boring bits.

But it didn't work out that way. I wanted readers of my novel to “see” and “smell” the 1700s the way I did. So I returned to the archives, researching life in 18th-century London as though I were preparing to teach a course. I found out what people ate for breakfast in 1711, what their overcoats were made from, what they wore on their feet when it was raining, what they did in the evenings. When I came to write the sex scenes, I consulted 18th-century medical texts, conduct manuals and pornographic novels, determined that no reader would come away without knowing exactly how they had sex in Augustan London.

And then a strange thing happened. As soon as I started turning all the facts I'd discovered back into fiction, I found myself loving scholarship again. It was like alchemy in reverse. The strange details, the unexpected idiosyncrasies of 300 years ago, for which the search was normally so painful when I did my research for teaching, became infinitely precious and rewarding. It made me love the “hard” parts of books again. Scraps of historical knowledge, laboriously acquired, had finally become the means by which I could give my own readers pleasure.

I had learned at last what makes books so deliciously fun, so uniquely delightful. Books treat their readers to the most decadent of pleasures: the knowledge that somebody else worked hard, precisely so that their readers didn't have to. And appropriately enough, it was the 18th-century moralists who taught us how perilously close pain is to pleasure, virtue to vice, industry to idleness. The historical setting of my book was more apposite than I'd realized: a time when reading for instruction and reading for delight were still one and the same.

Author Information
Sophie Gee is an assistant professor of English at Princeton. Scribner will publish her novel, The Scandal of the Season, in August.