I love a good non-fiction book. Fantastic feature writing makes me swoon. A great documentary is a beautiful thing.
It’s no wonder I took to history and do lots of writing. During my undergrad I enjoyed writing essays: not the stress of having too little time, but doing the research and thinking and writing and feeling like a mini expert on an interesting topic. That was fun. My long Master’s thesis was both the hardest and most rewarding thing I’d ever done. And I was so proud of it. When the time came to start my PhD I was thrilled to have a supervisor in the business of being super smart and writing brilliantly.
Unfortunately, doing a PhD in history mostly took me away from the things I love. In particular, the pressures and guilt of grad school meant that I didn’t read books that weren’t related to my work. In the last couple of years I’ve been reading more magazines and seeing more documentaries, and since I finished my dissertation I’ve made a determined effort to read books of different sorts. After giving a few genres a go, I realized non-fiction is for me: New Yorker-style essays and books are brilliant, advice books are fun and useful, biographies are cool. Any topic can be fascinating if handled intelligently and creatively. More recently, I’ve gotten into old movies, too. Right now I’m digging the early 1930s, but I’m still pretty new. Next week I’ll get to see the next installment in the 2012-13 Doc Soup series, to which I’m a three-time subscriber. I like learning. It’s awesome!
Thinking about my current hobbies and long-standing loves is an important part of the transition process. To wit, this career search question: Can I earn income learning cool things, doing neat stuff, and writing about it? Being paid to go to grad school had elements of cool, neat, and involved lots of writing; now that’s done and I have no desire to repeat the process. But if I admire a lot of the articles in the New Yorker, Maisonneuve, etc., and can’t get enough of books like this one (amazing!), then shouldn’t I try to emulate them? Yes. Of course! When I was an undergrad thinking about grad school programs—my BA was interdisciplinary—among the deciding factors was that I liked my history profs and I wanted to be like them. Now that I want to be like David Remnick instead—in combination with my PhD supervisor—shouldn’t I get going on being like him? Yes.
Gulp. Scary. (Wish me luck.)
