Retiring to read: variations on the reading experience in different social contexts
Different ethnographical studies on the contemporary reading experience show that solitude is chosen and set up by readers voluntarily and precisely. Not solitary people themselves, these readers have to conquer the necessary solitude for reading in spite of, and sometimes against, their social environment. In certain contexts, being a reader demands a steady action to retire from daily commitments and social interactions. For the reading women and the reading men whose daily habits and organization are analyzed here, the core of the problem is how retire from the intense social involvement they are part of : actually, there are strong effects of age and effects of gender in the social conditions that make the reading possible and desirable. Consequently, some patterns for this kind of social retreat can be drawn from different, and sometimes contradictory, configurations such as reading-as-a-child, reading-as-a-woman or reading-as-a-man.