I got my Ph.D. in English Literature; my research specialty was English Renaissance drama and my minor was Classical (i.e. Greek & Roman) drama, which means a lot of literary criticism, some social history, some theater history, some anthropology, some philosophy ...
The combination of graduate school and professional writer-dom seems to have killed my ability to read fiction for pleasure, so I read non-fiction by the bucketload. At this point, I read purely about things that catch my interest, almost none of which have anything to do with my academic specialties. Mostly, I seem to read about murderers, catastrophes, and places and times at which real societies have functioned like dystopias. So clearly what I read comes from the same thing that makes me a horror writer; how I read comes from a lot of practice in reading like an academic.
Which may be more answer than you were looking for. :)
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The combination of graduate school and professional writer-dom seems to have killed my ability to read fiction for pleasure, so I read non-fiction by the bucketload. At this point, I read purely about things that catch my interest, almost none of which have anything to do with my academic specialties. Mostly, I seem to read about murderers, catastrophes, and places and times at which real societies have functioned like dystopias. So clearly what I read comes from the same thing that makes me a horror writer; how I read comes from a lot of practice in reading like an academic.
Which may be more answer than you were looking for. :)