Rather than knitting... reading

As previously mentioned, I have given up knitting for Lent. The idea was that this would make space for me to do a lot of the things I love doing, but don't do much of any more because I'm knitting instead. Now that we're heading for Holy Week, with only one week of Lent left to go, I thought I'd look at what I have got done in place of knitting.

Firstly, reading. In the last few weeks I've done a lot more reading for pleasure than in the last few months, and have found reading more sustainedly compulsive than I have for the last few years. Now, this could be because of the lack of knitting...but I read very little for the first part of Lent, when knitting was replaced mostly by sewing (see tomorrow's post). So I'm led to conclude that the return of my 'reading mojo' was instigated not so much by Not Knitting, but by Not Working. After a spell of being very productive, I've just had a bit of holiday, during which time I wanted to read fiction for enjoyment and relaxation. But most of the time, when the absorbtion and production of words is my day job, as it were, the last thing I want to do with my non-thesis time is read yet more words.

Not that my academic work is inimical to my love of literature - it's just that it's hard for them to co-exist in the same space simultaneously. Actually, some of the books I've read in the last few weeks have had a deep impression on me precisely because of how they relate to my thesis. I'd just finished a chapter on the pleasures and perils of life-writing, of taking one's life and making it into a narrative which pupports to have some kind of 'truth.' I am about to embark on a chapter which discusses the generative relationships that are formed in the reading and writing of texts. Thus my academic work enriched, rather than exhausted, my leisure-time reading of AS Byatt's Possession and Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin (and to a lesser extent Sarah Walters's Tipping the Velvet and Maria McCann's The Wilding)- books about storytelling, history, secrets and literary relationships.

Hopefully, my newly-rediscovered pleasure of diving into a book, unaware of the time or what page I'm on, will survive my getting back into hardcore thesis-writing mode, and also when I take the knitting needles back up again. Because I don't think that Not Knitting and Reading More are entirely unrelated... without the temptation to put the book down and do another few rows, I've persevered with the book. Also, with less energy put towards creating with my hands, my reading has once again accessed the part of my brain that creates through reading someone else's words, rather than simply analyses. Not that I want to leave my analytical behind as I travel into the world of a book, rather I want her to follow, rather than determine, the imaginative path.