Reading for pleasure or reading "for pressure" in other languages?

In my first-year writing for multilingual students class today, we were talking about Jhumpa Lahiri's 2015 article, "Teach Yourself Italian," and about how her passion for Italian led her to decide to move to Italy and, in preparation, to "pledge to read only in Italian." The section of her article about that decision is called "The Renunciation." Lahiri writes, 

I consider it an official renunciation. I’m about to become a linguistic pilgrim to Rome. I believe I have to leave behind something familiar, essential.

We talked about the idea of renouncing our native language (in the students' case, to speak only in English). The students weren't very keen to renounce their native languages in order to speak only English. One mentioned that there is pressure from friends and classmates from their home country to speak their common language. Another suggested that because it's more difficult to speak English, to speak only English would result in a great loss of confidence. Also, their native languages are tied to their sense of who they are.

Lahiri's description of what it's like to read in Italian reminds me of what it's sometimes like when I read in Chinese:

I read slowly, painstakingly. With difficulty. Every page seems to have a light covering of mist. The obstacles stimulate me. Every new construction seems a marvel, every unknown word a jewel.

There's both pleasure and pressure in this depiction of reading in another language. You run into obstacles in the form of unfamiliar vocabulary or syntax, but getting past those obstacles seems to launch you forward (toward new obstacles!). If you take the time to work through those obstacles instead of bypassing them (as I admit I sometimes do), you have a feeling of accomplishment, and maybe you learn something new. As Lahiri puts it,

After I finish a book, I’m thrilled. It seems like a feat. I find the process demanding yet satisfying, almost miraculous. I can’t take for granted my ability to accomplish it. I read as I did when I was a girl. Thus, as an adult, as a writer, I rediscover the pleasure of reading.

As we were discussing Lahiri's experience, I asked the students if any of them read in English for pleasure. Some of them shook their heads, others laughed. My guess is that their reading in English is mostly (as a former Tunghai colleague put it) "for pressure" rather than for pleasure. I can understand this feeling. Most of the time when I read in Chinese, it's in order to write something (like that blog post on bookstores in colonial Taiwan), so there's some degree of pressure. 

But I wonder if we should (re)define the notion of "reading for pleasure"; after all, Lahiri's depiction of her experience reading in Italian shows that it's a lot of work to read in a language that you're not as strong in. Despite that, she treats the work of reading as pleasurable even if it is demanding (or perhaps because it is demanding).  

Some quick notes at the beginning of week 3 of the semester

I've gotten through two weeks of the semester already, and I'm not too far behind on my teaching-related work. Amazingly, I have been able to keep them in class and active for the whole 100 minutes so far. (I'm always afraid we will run out of things to do after about 15 minutes, and I'll have to let them go 85 minutes early...) So far we've had some interesting discussions about developing confidence writing in your L2/3/4/n (Maybe it should be called Ln writing...) Also the possible roles of translation in writing in English. For this, I was even able to talk a little about my 2013 (2014?) paper about Google Translate and EFL writing. 

I've also done most of the interviews of undergraduate Fulbright applicants whom I'm trying to help revise their applications. I have a meeting this week with the members of my subcommittee to go over the applications and share our suggestions about them. I hope these students will be able to get a chance to go abroad for a year and do some intercultural exchange. I know it changed my life.

Tomorrow morning I'm going to try to join my virtual writing group. We'll meet (virtually, of course) at 9:00 and share what we plan to work on for the next two hours, then go away and do it. Then come back at 10:55 and share what we did. My plan is to work on an application for the Rhetoric Society of American 2023 Summer Institute. I'm interested in a seminar on "Decolonizing Comparative Global Rhetorics." I think it could be very relevant to a paper I'm working on, but I'm not sure yet because I need to know more about what it means to decolonize comparative global rhetorics and how I might fit (if at all) into such an effort. (That's basically what my application narrative says so far...)

I'm also enjoying finally reading Ming-cheng M. Lo's Doctors Within Borders: Profession, Ethnicity, and Modernity in Colonial Taiwan (University of California Press, 2002). I've picked around in it before, but now I'm reading it from beginning to end. Lo had two recent interviews (part one, part two) related to this topic that reminded me that I hadn't actually read the book yet!