The press had a manuscript come in behind schedule last year, a genuinely difficult one, dense argumentation, footnotes that needed real fact-checking, an author who kept sending revisions in the middle of copyediting instead of before it, and I ended up on a six-week stretch where I was reading, closely, professionally, for eight or nine hours some days, sentence by sentence, checking every citation matched, every cross-reference actually pointed where it claimed to point.

What nobody warned me about, and what genuinely surprised me, is that I couldn’t read for pleasure afterward, not for weeks. I’d pick up a novel in the evening, something I’d been looking forward to, and find myself doing the exact same close, checking, slightly suspicious read I’d been doing all day at the desk, noticing sentence-level choices instead of just falling into the story, catching myself thinking “that’s doing a lot of work” about a perfectly normal transitional sentence that didn’t need that kind of attention at all. It wasn’t that the books were bad. It’s that I’d spent six weeks training myself into a reading mode that doesn’t know how to turn off on command.

I mentioned this to Priya at some point during that stretch and she said something that actually helped, that professional reading and pleasure reading aren’t really the same skill wearing different clothes, they’re closer to different muscles, and pushing one hard for six weeks straight doesn’t leave much left over for the other one. I hadn’t thought about it that way before, I’d sort of assumed reading was reading, and the same eyes doing the same basic task just with different material. It isn’t, apparently, or at least it doesn’t feel that way from the inside.

It took about three weeks after the manuscript shipped before a novel started working the normal way again, before I could just fall into a book instead of auditing it. I don’t have a tidy lesson here beyond noticing it happened, though I have started being a little more protective of the reading I do purely for myself during a heavy production stretch, even if that just means picking something short and undemanding instead of nothing at all.

What I’ve tried since, the next time a difficult manuscript came through, was picking something genuinely light for the evenings during that stretch, nothing I had any real stake in finishing quickly, no book I’d been looking forward to and didn’t want to burn on a bad reading mode. It helped some, not completely, I still caught myself doing the close audit-read a few nights in, but having somewhere lower-stakes to notice it happening meant I wasn’t losing a book I actually cared about to it.

I don’t know if this is a universal thing or just how my particular version of close reading works, but I’ve started asking other people who do detail-heavy work for a living, an accountant I know, a friend who does contract review, whether they’ve noticed anything similar, and enough of them have said some version of yes that I don’t think it’s just me. There’s apparently a real cost to spending all day in one specific gear, and it doesn’t seem to matter much what the gear is for, checking citations or checking numbers, the aftertaste is oddly similar either way.