Swing-Seat

Hermione Lee titled her inaugural lecture as Goldsmith's Professor of English Literature at Oxford 'Reading in Bed'.  In it, she draws a distinction between 'vertical' and 'horizontal' reading.  Vertical reading is 'regulated, supervised, orderly, canonical and productive'.  Horizontal reading is 'unlicensed, private, leisurely, disreputable, promiscuous, and anarchic'.  You might read vertically in a library, sitting up straight to take notes.  You might read horizontally in bed, along with a cup of tea or gin and tonic.  

We are in the process of buying a house and the lovely current owners have promised that they will leave the swing-seat in the garden.  I am already imagining a kind of reading in it that is both vertical and horizontal, official and unofficial, productive and anarchic.

[Hermione Lee, Reading in Bed: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered Before the University of Oxford on 21 October 1999 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999)]