Like the fellow who makes a living selling women’s lingerie, an English professor must make a conscious effort to ensure that the pleasures that inspired him to choose his career do not decline into mere duties. Woe to the teacher who discovers that the novels and poems that once aroused his passions now wait for him like so much laundry to be folded. For the chief feature of recreation is that it is not required -- a mandatory vacation from work is a lay-off by that or any other name. I have cosigned favorite books to syllabai and seen them suffer the strain of obligation. I have read them with a teacher’s priorities and predilections, identifying passages around which I might shape remarks for the sake of so many intimate relationships is true of textual ones as well: what begins in love surrenders to use. Finding them guilty of the crime of viability, I have sentenced beloved books to hard labor.

The advantage that comes from deforming pleasure into necessity is that every work I rework for lessons gets comprehensive treatment. In order to guarantee my facility with its details, nuances, and insights, along with my tenuous ascendancy among the students in my charge, I make a point of reading every line on every page, paying my regards down to the most negligible speck of punctuation. I do so not only to practice what I preach about readerly diligence but also to protect myself from any suspicion that my hold on the podium is undeserved. Thus the books I bring to class are amply branded, scored, filigreed, and tattooed by my private associations and sage asides for the sharing. They are flocked and fledged with Post-It Notes like the primaries and secondaries of exotic birds; “Hope is that thing with features,” wrote Emily Dickinson, and my books are positively downy with it. So while the poet might rightly protest that hired melodies are sweet, but those unhired are sweeter, I maintain that the reader who is assigned a delight, like the inmate given a lavish dinner on death row, while he may not find the dish delectable, can nevertheless be depended upon not to leave anything on his plate.

As for the books I exclusively reserve for my own diversion and my night stand, however, the ones I deduct from time spent on my courses if not my taxes, these face the risk of desertion. For while I’ll slog through every book I mean to teach even when the plot thickens to tar and the print runs to tundra, I will occasionally cut bait on a book that I’ve begun simply for my own amusement when it no longer amuses. I can afford to be bored, in other words -- I can dump its words for other words at my whim. In fact, ditching an unassigned book can be as liberating an experience as determining to read a la carte in the first place, Liberating, but also empowering: not every petitioner to the king earns an audience, nor every case brought to the Supreme Court a hearing, which is in large part what makes the king regal and the court supreme. That I can have a story that doesn’t send me rescinded, that I can return a book uncompleted to the library like a steak to the chef without any justification other than that I found it undercooked instead of having to force down every unwelcome bite like a child wishing to be released from the table to play, can be so enticing that I might deliberately pick up a discreditable text just for the satisfaction of disposing of it as casually as I opened it.