Contemporary Reading Practices Research Articles

Supplemental Material for Paths to Transformation Across Contemporary Reading Practices: The Role of Motivations and Genre Preferences

Supplemental Material for Paths to Transformation Across Contemporary Reading Practices: The Role of Motivations and Genre Preferences

Paths to transformation across contemporary reading practices: The role of motivations and genre preferences.

Paths to transformation across contemporary reading practices: The role of motivations and genre preferences.

Word, Text and Reading in the Digital Age

The paper discusses the problem of reading in the digital environment among the young generation. The point of departure is the observation that young people’s reading practices have changed over the last decade. It was hypothesized that the reason for this change is that young people increasingly read electronic texts instead of printed texts. For the study, a literature review was performed, and five focus group discussions with secondary school and university teachers were conducted. Focus group discussions provided empirical material for the analysis of contemporary reading practices and the related problems of the learning process. The literature review and focus group discussions show that reading from screen devices has affected reading strategies and the text decoding and comprehension process. The participants of the discussions pointed to the crucial role of the internet in forming the attitude towards reading and the development of new reading practices among young people. The teachers were generally critical towards the effects of the information and communication technologies and expressed concern about the quality of reading from digital devices. It was pointed out that students now prefer to read shorter pieces of text, they often lack the necessary concentration and, as a result, do not achieve a satisfactory understanding of the text. Reading tends to become a practice of extracting information. Literature review points to the same tendency. The technological embeddedness of reading in the digital age brings about a change in the approach to reading. The internet allows quick access to vast volumes of information and provides the possibility of getting to know many facts, but it fosters extensive rather than intensive or deep reading.

“Inside many of us / is a small old man” – age/ing in Anne Sexton’s Transformations: A community discussion

Abstract The poetry book Transformations by Anne Sexton consists of seventeen poems based on the versions of fairytales by the Brothers Grimm. Told by Sexton, the tales become sharp comments on American culture, changing characters and action to focus on gender, power systems and medical histories. Analyzing the poems “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”, “Rapunzel”, and “Rumpelstiltskin”, this article focusses on Sexton’s revelation of the aging and ageism inherent in both the fairytales and contemporary American culture. I am interested in a reading of the poems beyond the confessional approach so common in analyses of Sexton’s poetry, focusing instead on how the characters struggle with beauty expectations, age and gender roles as well as loneliness. Therefore, I have discussed the chosen poems with different communities beyond the academic context with an interest in other approaches and experiences applied in the readings. The voices are woven into the article, adding to the analysis and offering a comment on contemporary reading practices.

Digital visionary women: introducing the “Catalogue of Living Saints”

ABSTRACT This article introduces the “Catalogue of Living Saints,” a wiki catalogue that provides knowledge about the lives of Castilian charismatic women, prior to Teresa of Ávila (d. 1582), who acquired reputations for holiness in their own times. The lives of these “holy” women show great contact between court and convent, and they contribute to better understanding the history of women and their subsequent impact on society. The collected lives appeared in a diversity of sources: manuscripts of the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, including conventual books and compendia containing lives of saints, handwritten and printed chronicles of religious orders in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Castile, and other works. Thus, the Catalogue recovers several texts that have never been printed before and that in most cases were never edited independently. Furthermore, it integrates the development of a database in order to understand the different proposed hagiographical models and their performative shape and spatial distribution of power. Additionally, this article discusses how gathering, editing, and reading the lives of these women via an open-access virtual tool creates a new hermeneutical framework regarding the materiality of the original codices and printed volumes. Finally, it proposes mitigation measures in the near future to bring contemporary reading practices (and interpretation) closer to historical ones.

Contributors

Other| April 01 2019 Contributors Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture (2019) 6 (1): 272–273. https://doi.org/10.1215/23290048-7568605 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Contributors. Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture 1 April 2019; 6 (1): 272–273. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/23290048-7568605 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsJournal of Chinese Literature and Culture Search Advanced Search ANNE BURKUS-CHASSON is associate professor of art history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research concentrates on the painting and print culture of late imperial China. She is particularly interested in examining how words and visual images variously interact in illustrated books and inscribed paintings from the late Ming period. Her first book, Through a Forest of Chancellors: Fugitive Histories in Liu Yuan's “Lingyan ge,” an Illustrated Book from Seventeenth-Century Suzhou (2010), considers how Liu Yuan manipulated both contemporary reading practices and contemporary viewing practices to articulate a proposition about loyalty, a proposition that embraced the ambiguities and complications that characterized the political situation of the 1660s. Her second book, in progress, examines the intersection between print and painting in Chen Hongshou's work. Recently, having become engaged in the environmental humanities, she is also working on a reevaluation of Qi Biaojia's various writings about his famous garden at... You do not currently have access to this content.

“My History, Finally Invented”: Nightwood and Its Publics

Abstract Djuna Barnes’s 1937 novel Nightwood has long been a mainstay of GLBTQ, lesbian, and/or queer canons, syllabi, and reading lists. This article argues that canons, syllabi, and reading lists promise readers the experience of “feeling public.” Drawing upon magazine and newspaper reviews, scholarly journal articles, memoirs, and reviews from the literary social networking site Goodreads, this article constructs a reception history of Nightwood that demonstrates that the book has been incorporated by modernist literary publics and lesbian publics into those publics’ own histories and into their members’ everyday worldmaking practices. This article compares historical and contemporary reading practices to argue that queer texts and reading practices make GLBTQ readers feel public, even in private. Queer novels performed important worldmaking work in the early 20th century, and continue to do so. Framed by affect studies, queer studies, and reception studies, the case study of Nightwood ’s history demonstrates that categories like “queer literature” shape affective reading practices, and vice versa.

Emotional landscapes of reading: fan fiction in the context of contemporary reading practices

This article focuses on fan fiction as a literary experience and especially on fan fiction readers’ receptive strategies. Methodologically, its approach is at the intersection of literary theory, theory of popular culture, and qualitative research into practices of communication within online communities. It characterizes fan fiction as a type of contemporary reading and writing. Taking as an example the Russian Harry Potter fan fiction community, the article poses a set of questions about the meanings and contexts of immersive reading and affective reading. The emotional reading of fan fiction communities is put into historical and theoretical context, with reference to researchers who analysed and criticized the dichotomy of rational and affective reading, or ‘enchantment’, in literary culture as one of the symptoms of modernity. The metaphor of ‘emotional landscapes of reading’ is used to theorize the reading strategies of fan fiction readers, and discussed through parallels with phenomenological theories of landscape. Among the ‘assemblage points of reading’ of fan fiction, specific elements are described, such as ‘selective reading’, ‘kink reading’, ‘first encounter with fan fiction texts’ and ‘unpredictability’.

Reading ‘On the Go’: An Inquiry into the Tempos and Temporalities of the Cellphone Novel

ABSTRACTThis article examines the phenomenon of the cellphone novel in contemporary Japan. In contrast to dominant approaches that have focused on questions of literary merit, I explore the tempos and temporalities of the cellphone novel as reading ‘on the go’. Drawing on ethnographic accounts, I attempt to develop the notion of reading ‘on the go’ so that we may move beyond prevailing discussions of cellphone novels, which have focused mainly on the literary sophistication, or lack thereof, of cellphone novels and novelists. Additionally, I argue that there is underlying tension between ‘literature’ and ‘Literature’ vis-à-vis questions of ‘proper’ reading tempos among Japanese readers. In order to explore the political, ideological, and aesthetic ramifications of changing reading and writing practices, this article places the twenty-first century controversy over cellphone novels in dialogue with a historical precedent, the early modern literary movement known as the unification of spoken and written Japanese (genbun itchi). In so doing, the article examines a corollary relation between changes in literary trends and spatiotemporal transformations that provide a reading and writing environment. Ultimately, the article suggests that the ongoing spatiotemporal reconfigurations and negotiations prompted by the evolving digital media communication network, its infrastructure, and accompanying commercial industries play a critical role in informing how contemporary practices of reading and writing take shape.

In the Interval of the Wave: Prince Edward Island Women’s Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Life Writing by Mary McDonald-Rissanen (review)

Reviewed by: In the Interval of the Wave: Prince Edward Island Women’s Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Life Writing by Mary McDonald-Rissanen Melanie Ried (bio) Mary McDonald-Rissanen. In the Interval of the Wave: Prince Edward Island Women’s Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Life Writing. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2014. 292 pp. ISBN 978-0773543898, $34.95. In this well-researched book, Mary McDonald-Rissanen offers an interdisciplinary study of nineteenth and early twentieth century Prince Edward Island women’s “journals intime.” She performs a close reading of the eighteen women’s diaries she has identified “buried in archives”—all but one handwritten [End Page 1157] manuscripts—and she draws on a broad array of critics and theorists of culture, feminism, and travel writing, including Nancy Armstrong, Philippe Lejeune, and Mary Louise Pratt, in analyzing the thematic issues and the writing practices that emerge. McDonald-Rissanen argues that through private writing, the women were able to document and to reflect on their lives, discursively constructing evolving selves that negotiated the parameters of identity created by the material conditions and the ideologies of the time period and the location where each lived and wrote. Issues of sexuality, class, and nationality are revealed and explored through this gendered reading of the journals and the specific cultural contexts in which they were produced. The diaries are categorized by their setting—rural, urban, or travel—and they transverse key historical moments in Canadian and Western history, from the development of the British colony on PEI to Canadian independence, from the opening of the teaching profession to women to twentieth-century modernity. In her first chapter, McDonald-Rissanen establishes both her overall methodology and her personal connection to one of the journals, which inspired her research. Although most of the chapters focus on individual diarists, McDonald-Rissanen’s frequent cross-references and her liberal use of thematic sub-headings create cross-generational conversations amongst the women. That conversation is expanded to include us, McDonald-Rissanen’s fellow scholars, through her occasional personal anecdotes and her analysis of contemporary reading practices of historical life writing. The first chapter opens by acknowledging well-known PEI author Lucy Maud Montgomery, whose private journals were posthumously published in five volumes. Montgomery is again discussed in the second chapter, but only rarely referenced thereafter. Her legacy is paradoxical: a talented writer who transcended gender barriers in publishing her writing, but whose shadow has eclipsed the “more humble and cryptic texts of ordinary women whose diaries have survived by luck and the kindness of families who donated them to public archives” (51). The second chapter examines the representations of women in local nineteenth and early twentieth century newspapers, advertisements, songs, and folk stories—representations the “ordinary women” diarists would have seen and heard throughout their lives. McDonald-Rissanen also considers history texts and contemporary statistical analysis. Her findings are not surprising: women were almost entirely left out of historical records and accounts, and commercial print media idealized domesticity and motherhood while problematizing the female body through a “preoccupation with women’s health” (47). Examining “ordinary women[’s]” life writing to identify how they constructed themselves as physical and intellectual subjects thus becomes crucial to better understanding social history and the “subtle politics [End Page 1158] of cultural selection,” as McDonald-Rissanen applies Ian McKay’s terminology (219). Chapters three through five each primarily focus on an individual rural diarist: Emma Chadwick Stretch, writing between 1856–60; Amy Darby Tanton Andrew, 1910–1915; and Lucy Bardon Palmer Haslam, 1884–1943. Stretch’s diary began as an account ledger while she and her family lived in England, and she resumed writing in it three years after emigrating, incorporating brief accounts of daily farm life into records of purchases and trades; in this way Stretch writes herself into a new identity as a pioneer woman. Andrew also inscribes a shift in her identity during the years her diary spans, from a single woman living with her family to a married woman starting her own family and managing her own house and farm. This shift manifests over time, the demands of her new role and her insecurities indicated by cryptic entries...

Isn’t It a Beautiful Day? An Interview with J. Hillis Miller

This interview with esteemed literary critic J. Hillis Miller was conducted via Skype on July 17, 2013. Miller speaks about a number of issues important to his life and work. Providing a number of emblematic parables, Miller discusses his early career, his work on the poetry of William Carlos Williams, and his famous essay “The Critic as Host.” He then addresses the reception of his criticism, his thoughts on irony and the work of Paul de Man, the current state of the humanities and humanities education, and the impact of digital technologies on contemporary reading practices. The interview concludes with a discussion of PRISM and the continuing importance of reading and studying literature.

The immaterial book: reading and romance in early modern England

In romances--Renaissance England's version of the fantasy novel--characters often discover books that turn out to be magical or prophetic, and to offer insights into their readers' selves. The Immaterial Book examines scenes of reading in important romance texts across genres: Spenser's Faerie Queene , Shakespeare's Cymbeline and The Tempest , Wroth's Urania , and Cervantes' Don Quixote . It offers a response to material book studies by calling for a new focus on imaginary or immaterial books, and argues that early modern romance authors, rather than replicating contemporary reading practices within their texts, are reviving ancient and medieval ideas of the book as a conceptual framework, which they use to investigate urgent, new ideas about the self and the self-conscious mind.

Reading and Being Read: Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place as Literary Agent

Reading and Being ReadJamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place as Literary Agent Lesley Larkin (bio) If as teachers of literature we teach reading, literature can be our teacher as well as our object of investigation. . . . Our own undecidable meaning is in the irreducible figure that stands in for the eyes of the other. This is the effortful task: to displace the fear of our faceless students, behind whom are the eyes of the global others. Otherwise, who crawls into the place of the “human” of “humanism” at the end of the day, even in the name of diversity? —Gayatri Spivak Of course, the whole thing is, once you cease to be a master, once you throw off your master’s yoke, you are no longer human rubbish, you are just a human being, and all the things that adds up to. So, too, with the slaves. Once they are no longer slaves, once they are free, they are no longer noble and exalted; they are just human beings. —Jamaica Kincaid In her 2003 work, Death of a Discipline, Gayatri Spivak calls for university teachers to understand literature as a teacher in its own right. “If as teachers of literature we teach reading,” Spivak writes, then “literature can be our teacher as well as our object of investigation” (23). Imagining literature—especially literature categorized as “ethnic” or “global”—as a pedagogical agent, Spivak calls for a shift in institutional power, one that counters the intransigent asymmetry in Western universities that presents ethnic and global “others” to Western subjects for analysis rather than dialogue. Such reading encounters avoid submitting readers to a counterhegemonic gaze while they ponder feelings of self-difference1 (“our own undecidable meaning”) in response to encounters with ethnic difference (Death 23). Such reading encounters are also, Spivak suggests, scenes of subjection at which readers occupy the “place of the human” in contradistinction to persons figured by the ethnic literary text (Death 23). Despite multiculturalism’s effort to challenge the exclusive category of the human, the privileged “place” of this category in the university has not been eliminated. And although the postmodern human2 is not ascribed the stability that was previously the hallmark, however false, of its predecessors, it is imbued with a similar privilege—one that is transacted against “others” retained as objects of intellectual labor. In the context of contemporary literary studies, the place of the human continues to be occupied by privileged reading subjects.3 [End Page 193] It is against the interpellation of the postmodern human that Spivak warns her audience of literature professors. And it is to literature that she turns for remedy. But her solution is not simple, for readers, particularly university students, are often blind to the lessons in critical self-reflection many works of ethnic literature offer—not least because they are encouraged to view such literature instrumentally. (How will reading this work help me compete against global peers?) Encounters with ethnic literatures are not enough to dislodge readers from positions of privilege or to “displace the fear” of lost privilege Spivak identifies in her “faceless students” (Death 23). Acknowledging that the presence of diverse literatures is not a sufficient condition for the wholesale reordering of power relations within the academy, Spivak presents literature not as an object to be mastered but as a pedagogical agent—a teacher. It is with Spivak’s call in mind that I turn to Jamaica Kincaid’s devastating account of tourism, A Small Place (1988), which anticipates and extends Spivak’s formulation of literature as pedagogical agent. Kincaid’s brief collection of essays, which takes on Antigua’s tourist economy, selfish tourists, hapless “natives,” corrupt politicians, and the slavers and slaves that preceded them all, functions quite deliberately as a teacher. Using second-person address throughout, A Small Place points the finger at its actual readers, critiquing contemporary reading practices for their affinity with global tourism and imperialism. Even more dramatically, this text teaches readers how to read it as it unfolds. Rhonda Frederick has captured the pedagogical force of A Small Place in a persuasive essay detailing her teaching strategies. Arguing against the impulse to mollify “mainstream” students by encouraging identificatory reading...

In consideration of the evolution of explorers and travellers into authors: a model

Contemporary reading practices exert considerable pressure on the narratives of explorers and travellers; consequently, an inextricable identity is usually assumed between the eyewitness observer and the first-person narrator. Since the time of Hakluyt, not discriminating among accounts written during and after journeys and voyages, or not interrogating the implications for critical interpretation of the stage of narrative under examination have marked reading practices of the genre. Yet, exploration and travel writing often exhibits considerable discrepancies between primary accounts penned in remote parts of the globe and their subsequently published counterparts, often much more secondary than is acknowledged. Emphasising difference rather than seamless continuity between traveller/explorer and published author prompts the proposal of one model by which analyses of narratives might be conducted, case by case. In light of it, the Hakluyt Society's series of publications receive discussion.

Repugnant Aboriginality: LeAnne Howe's Shell Shaker and Indigenous Representation in the Age of Multiculturalism

Surprisingly for a novel evidently invested in representations of contemporary Choctaw traditionalism as a viable alternative to settler society, LeAnne Howe's 2001 Shell Shaker gives unrelenting play to the gruesomeness, horror even, of the traditional rituals it depicts at the risk of reinforcing stereotypes of Indian savagery. Yet these depictions of the repugnant, that is, of ancient practices now prohibited by law or found reprehensible by a public sense of ethics, allow Howe to escape the integrative thrust of contemporary multiculturalism by preempting identification through difference—an interpretive logic according to which we are all the same because we are all different—at the center of contemporary multicultural reading practices. As the readers of Howe's novel recoil at the repugnant, they experience a limit to their understanding of the indigenous Other, a goal ethnic writing is presumed to facilitate. Howe's novel is a plea for alternative ways of apprehending difference in contemporary North America, whether we attempt it through reading literature or through other private or public activities. By redefining the interpretive ground of contemporary reading practices, Shell Shaker clears space for the potential welcoming of the (indigenous) Other despite freshly experienced limits of understanding, a welcoming that is not predicated on exacting transparency in exchange for acknowledgment. Further, the novel prompts an acknowledgment of contemporary indigenous nations, and the contemporary versions of indigenous traditionalism in particular, as viable forms of governance and sociality, forms that already successfully constitute political reality in North America.

The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control

Reviewed by: The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control Sarah Lowengard (bio) The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control. By Ted Striphas. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Pp. xii+242. $27.50. Is there an unprecedented crisis in book publishing? Are we in the midst of an extended and monumental change to the creation and distribution of a well-established and universal aspect of our culture: readership? Will some [End Page 1046] future generation of readers never experience the tactile, visual, and olfactory pleasures of a book, having instead as their only option the less aesthetic and more uncomfortable "electronic book" or perhaps audio or video versions? According to Ted Striphas, the answers to these questions are emphatically negative. Working from an assumption that the bloody-minded self-assessments of the book-publishing industry may not be the most complete or least-biased view, he points out that data about contemporary practices of reading, writing, and selling books are open to differing interpretations. Striphas deemphasizes the "either-or" attitudes of much popular reporting about books and the book business. Without serving as apologist for any side, he uses the development and concerns of the twentieth-century book industry (publishers, sellers, and, to a lesser extent, consumers) to contextualize that of the early twenty-first century. The Late Age of Print is not an elegy for a means of communication, but a description of the conflicts and ironies of book creation and distribution in our time. If there is now a crisis in book publishing, it seems that it is not the first one. The industry has characterized itself as under attack since books became mass-market consumer items. Striphas attributes that event to changes in marketing instigated in the 1920s and 1930s. Since then, the business models favored by publishing houses have always been trauma-inducing, in part because they expect consumer behavior that violates social norms. The onslaughts that have prevented the industry from achieving the heights it espies include paperback and other cheap editions, libraries, schemes to share books among readers, photocopiers, and the need for warehouse bookstores to sell books at extremely low margins. And, once profitability became a goal for all of the publishing industry, decisions began to revolve around possession: How much (money, market share, points on the best-seller lists) can we keep? How much can we keep away from others? Is the United States at risk of becoming a nation of non-readers? Striphas analyzes some familiar counterindications of the demise of the reading public and, by inference, of books as desirable commodities. Again, he finds ambiguity in commonly reported events. These include the same big-box or warehouse bookstores that damage profit margins and overwhelm local independent shops, the Harry Potter "phenomenon," with information lockdowns that encourage piracy along with publication-date frenzies, and the national reading groups, like Oprah's Book Club, which turn a private act (reading and interpreting an author's work) into a far more public endeavor. Striphas's descriptions indicate that branding and marketing concerns are a source of conflict. Were the much-anticipated books in the Harry Potter series pirated and released ahead of time because the publisher used secrecy as a marketing tool? Who reads Oprah Winfrey's selections in their entirety, if she often apologizes for the choice (many pages, difficult words) [End Page 1047] and her presentations emphasize the author's "story" rather than themes and expression of the book itself? Do the big bookstores always cause a "Wal-Mart effect," or do they sometimes open the box on the independents and expose longstanding problems of haphazard management? Striphas's underlying questions are very practical ones, focused on the materiality of books and control issues in the amalgamation of publishing-distribution-writing-reading. His discussion of popular electronic books and the machines to read them (such as the Kindle) again suggest that the object of the debate may be refocused, but the underlying issues are the same: piracy and unauthorized sharing, and discussions about inadequate formats that mimic arguments about paperback vs. hardcover books, all code for reduced sales. A critical aspect...

Culturas literárias e cultura digital: percursos, cruzamentos, desafios

Integrados que estamos numa “sociedad red” (Castells, 2001) e caracterizando-se a contemporaneidade pela experiência de uma cultura digital com consequências profundas nos mais diversos domínios da actividade humana e, por conseguinte, também no que toca à criação literária, aos Estudos Literários e ao ensino da Literatura, procurar-se-á, na presente comunicação, reflectir sobre percursos, cruzamentos e desafios que o hipermédia potenciou ou pode potenciar, ao nível da construção e difusão das culturas literárias, já que permite explorar um fazer artístico numa articulação com as novas tecnologias da informação e da comunicação e potencia novos modos de contacto e abordagem do facto literário do ponto de vista da recepção. Ora, pensar as práticas de leitura contemporâneas é tanto mais vital quanto, no domínio em que nos situamos, a leitura é ferramenta fundamental no processo de ensino-aprendizagem.

'Mich in variationen erzählen': Günter Grass and the Ethics of Autobiography

This article examines Grass's 2006 autobiography Beim Hauten der Zwiebel against the background of a long career of overtly complex literary self-presentation. Its aim is twofold: to situate the autobiography as an aesthetic form within Grass's œuvre, and to use what I term Grass's much wider `autobiographical project', developed over the course of his career, to suggest that a kind of narrative ethics may in fact underlie much apparently wilful posturing in autobiographically informed literature. Using Philippe Lejeune to develop the idea of a `contractual effect' felt by author and reader, I argue that Grass draws on the autobiographical mode in order to critique contemporary reading practices.

Good for What?

Since the publication of Readers' Advisory Service in the Public Library (Joyce Saricks. ALA Editions: 1989, 1997, 2005) readers' advisors have used the concept of as a way to connect readers with books. Looking at the elements of a piece of writing--character, language, mood, setting, and story, and what the reader prefers in each area--helps the readers' advisor to make connections between works that the reader may not have considered, and thus expands the possible choices for that reader. What has been less explored, though, is the concept of working with those elements of a book that the reader did not enjoy. In her two-part column, Joan Bessman Taylor explores the role of these non-appealing elements in the practice of readers' advisory. In part one, Taylor looks at how readers' advisors can best work with discussing that do not to them personally but that a reader enjoys. She suggests that understanding can expand the possibilities for making thoughtful suggestions. In part two (RUSQ 47-1), Taylor applies the concept of to working with reading groups in selecting titles that will generate lively and thoughtful discussion. Joan Bessman Taylor is a faculty member in the School of Library and Information Science at the University of Iowa. This column is based on her six years of participant observation in six book groups of varying focus and membership. Her dissertation is titled When Adults Talk in Circles: Book Groups and Contemporary Reading Practices, and is being conducted in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.--Editor. Pacing, characterization, storyline, frame--those who work in reader services know well the aspects of described by Joyce Saricks in Readers' Advisory Service in the Public Library. (1) We may also, as almost second nature, consider the mood of the patron, the reading experience sought, and the patron's tolerance for the cost in time and money finding and reading a certain book will require as is suggested through Catherine Ross's research on how readers select pleasure reading. (2) But how often do we consider what one regular contributor to the Fiction_L electronic discussion list referred to as the dark underbelly of readers' advisory (RA) service--what people dislike about some books? (3) We operate in terms of factors, focusing on what a book has or does, but what about what a book does not have, does not include, or includes when it could have been omitted without anyone missing it? What about non-appeal factors? (I am intentionally avoiding calling these factors for two reasons. I do not want to cast the fact that people dislike certain qualities of as a attribute, and because the term negative appeal is used very explicitly in the marketing field to refer to attempts to increase people's anxiety about not using a service by stressing the loss they will experience if they do not purchase that service. Understand also that many people include these aspects when they refer to factors, though they rarely do so explicitly.) There may be just as much to draw from the reasons people dislike a book (whether they are library patrons or the librarian striving to serve them) as there is from why the same book is revered by someone else. Being a reading advocate does not mean that one must love every book ever written or feign love when a book is not of one's preference. Professionals are people with feelings and opinions, not unlike those of the communities we serve. So how do you talk about a book you dislike when trying to recommend it to someone else who might it? It was precisely this question that was posed, though only partially addressed, on Fiction_L last March. Of course, questions are rarely initiated in such a straight-forward and clear-cut manner. Like all things, they emerge in a context. What erupted into a passionate and lengthy discussion by librarians of books you didn't like (and in some cases hated) and a debate about the extent to which one should feel comfortable on a professional electronic discussion list venting feelings that some might view as in conflict with our mission, began innocently enough. …

Servants' Reading: An Examination of the Servants' Library at Cragside

Cragside in Northumberland was originally the home of the 1st Lord Armstrong and his heirs and is now a National Trust property. The servants' library, examined here, was established at the end of the nineteenth century. Such libraries are rare but can add to our understanding of contemporary reading practices. The acquisition of the books and evidence of readership are examined. The stock appears in some ways to be a haphazard collection; there is little evidence of an overt desire to provide improving books. The provenance of some titles can be traced.