READING WITHIN THE LIVES OF AVID READERS

My dissertation seeks to add to our understanding of reading as a social and cultural practice by examining the roles that reading plays within the everyday lives of four avid readers. The recent proliferation of national reading studies in the English-speaking world indicates a current international preoccupation with reading, but neither these studies nor most previous academic scholarship on reading have taken actual, individual readers into account. Through employing a self-reflexive ethnographic life history approach that includes a series of interviews with each reader and an analysis of how the readers arrange their reading materials in their homes, my work contextualizes how readers use reading and make it meaningful. I argue that new questions and emphases emerge once we center studies of reading within the lives and words of actual readers. For example, my focus on these readers ’ daily reading practices reveals problems inherent in privileging book and literary reading and points to the need to include a broader variety of genres and a wider array of formats, such as periodicals and online reading, if we wish to understand how reading is used in everyday life. Looking at each reader’s life history also emphasize