Post #1943172

Reading through a manuscript for a university press as a reviewer (not a thing I normally do, but it's on a subject I care a lot about) and I'm struck by both how much I enjoyed this kind of research, the difficulty of doing it, that part of me misses it, and part of me is relieved to not have to. The idea of slowly writing a monograph and conducting all of this in-depth research sounds amazing. It's really fun. But the reality of doing it inside academia is that it's a stressful nightmare, not least on a logistical level -- and doing it outside academia is even worse. Even the pressure that you're under to produce if you're doing it for an academic career is suffocating. I'll never write anything like my dissertation again. Part of that is bittersweet, but there's also a real sense of relief. Anyway, happy to be recommending this book.