Professor Ben Davies (University of Southern Denmark)
A Reading List on Reading.
Much of my recent research focuses on the relations between reading, readers, and time use, both inside and outside the university. My co-authored book Reading Novels During the Covid-19 Pandemic (2022) combined qualitative research on readers in lockdown and more traditional forms of criticism to provide a sense of what and how people were and weren’t reading during this time. This book follows readers turning to audiobooks to escape from their partners, readers who read about atrocities to put Covid into a more manageable perspective, to those who reread whatever books happened to be in their lockdowned homes. Some of the works that I enjoy and return to that explore reading and readers are:
Janice Radway, Reading the Romance (1984) – A classic in the field, which involved – unusually at the time – doing fieldwork with women readers in the Midwest to explore the roles romantic fiction played in their daily lives.
Daniel Pennac, The Rights of the Reader (1992) – A fun, entertaining exploration of readerly agency, emphasing the pleasure – as opposed to rules – of reading.
Megan Sweeney, Reading is My Window (2010) – A fascinating account of the meaning and value of reading to African American women in the US prison system.
Ali Smith, Artful (2012) – A lecture delivered as narrative written up as a narrative about writing (or not) a lecture, through its form and subject matter Artful offers an intricate exploration of reading and its relation to time.
Leah Price, What We Talk About When We Talk About Books (2019) – An important work that puts today’s reading debates in context by offering a nuanced account of how ‘reading’ has always involved practices other than those presented by images of the idealised solitary reader who reads undistracted from beginning to end.
Matthew Rubery, Reader’s Block (2022) – A fascinating account of neurodivergent reading, this work shows – and champions – that ‘reading’ is many things, practised in many different ways.
