"Miss Eliza Bennet," said Miss Bingley, "despises cards. She is a great reader and has no pleasure in anything else."

It is a truth universally acknowledged that those who read for a living will never pick up a book on their own if they can possibly help it. Diane Setterfield, one of my new favorite academics-turned-authors, lists the erosion of her private reading time as her primary motivator for leaving the ivory tower. "I was plagued," she said, "by the feeling that by some absurd mistake I was leading someone else's life." Imagine my horror when I realized that, three years into my graduate degree, I could list the books that I had read for fun on one hand! (Harry Potter doesn't count.) It would not do. I had gone from being the type of insanely bookish child that teachers and librarians dream about (and other children think is Weird) to being recreationally illiterate.

How had this happened? Anyone who is or has been a student or an academic will understand: you arrive home in the evening, tired from hunching over some very large, thick book (with inevitably tiny type) at your library carrel only to remember that you still have to read over an article to prepare for your section the next day and make a handout for your students. You eat some depressing dinner that likely came out of a box, wishing desperately that you could just watch some CSI or Law and Order instead of making vocabulary lists. You finally finish just as bedtime approaches and fall gratefully into your pillows. The light goes out instantly. The stack of books you have hopefully placed on your bedside table will only move in the morning when you knock them over trying to get to your alarm clock. Pathetic.

It isn't that you don't want to read--the horrible part is that you do want to read--but that you simply can't bear to look at any more words on a page than you have to. The worst sufferers of Academic Illiteracy go beyond mere aversion to guilt: how can you justify spending a half an hour of consciousness (and brain power) on a novel? You should be working! Any time not spent sleeping, eating, showering (occasionally), teaching, learning, meeting, or studying should be spent reading Art Bulletin, not The Portrait of a Lady.

I returned to reading completely by accident two years ago when I started seeing a guy we'll just call A. A is not an academic, so he reads. He reads voraciously, every night before he goes to sleep he'll knock out fifty pages. When bedtime arrived, the light did not go out instantly. Instead, I lay awake, bored to tears, for at least twenty minutes while he happily read Graham Greene. One day, as we were getting ready to decamp to his house for the evening and I was stuffing the usual next day's clothes and research book in my backpack, I grabbed a novel from my bookshelf and stuffed it in there too. It was The Hours by Michael Cunningham, which my brother had given me years before and had lain gathering dust ever since (although I'd loved the film). Later that night, when we got ready for bed, again the light did not go out instantly. But this time I did not lie awake resentfully wishing for something to do; I read about Virginia, Laura, and Clarissa and I was happy. Maybe one day I will write and post a review of The Hours. All I'll say for now is that it's one of those books that is so good it's unfair.

Two years later, I still don't have my Ph. D. and I still read for fun. Shortly after my Hours Revelation, I left school for a while to rethink my dissertation topic, get some real world experience, and sort some things out for myself (why am I on the planet, is my self-worth wholly reliant on footnotes, etc.). Sound familiar to anyone? One of the first things I did when I arrived back in my hometown to take a teaching job was join a book club. A book a month, I could handle that. A book a month and some new friends--I was desperately lonely with A and my school friends 500 miles away. My rehabilitation was slow and I'll admit that I didn't finish several of the first books we read. (Old habits are hard to break--what was I doing reading for fun when I had powerpoints to make and papers to grade? Bad! Lazy!) I got better, though, and now I'm proud to say that I not only do I finish each book club book, I read extra books on the side! Lots of books. In fact, I can't stop. I am like Amy Winehouse with a library card (and no crack). It's awesome.

Which brings me to the point, if you're still reading. Are you? One of my favorite book review blogs, Medieval Bookworm, announced a challenge for 2010: A Tournament of Reading. The challenge is to read nine (at the 'king' level) books about the Middle Ages, at least two each in historical fiction, medieval literature, and history. In the spirit of the New Year, I have decided to expand the challenge: fifty books this year, about one book a week. Some of them will be medieval, most will not.

Before you write me off, this is not a Julie & Julia thing (though that movie is wonderful, I love you, Nora Ephron!). I don't expect this "project" to change my life, I don't expect to wind up in the New York Times, and I sure as hell don't expect to get a book contract or be played by Amy Adams on the silver screen. This is just me, fifty-two weeks and fifty books, reading and reviewing in the hopes that somewhere out there--a grad student, teacher, or anyone else suffering from Academic Illiteracy (or any other kind of Acquired Adult-Onset Illiteracy)--will want to pick up a Fun Book and join the party.

So here's to a year of reading dangerously!