Book contents
5 - Adulthood: The Pragmatic Reader
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 September 2009
Summary
According to the 1983 Book Industry Study Group report half of the adults in this country read books regularly, but fiction of course competes for the reader's attention with biography, cookbooks, self-help psychology, religion, and, especially, job-oriented books. Among leisure activities reading comes after television, radio, time spent with family, and listening to music. What fiction is read by adults does not appear to be of high quality; the most favored categories are action and adventure novels, historical novels, mystery and detective novels, a category called “modern dramatic novels,” and romances. The amount of reading an individual does is likely to stay the same from age sixteen to fifty, then drop off, especially among readers older than sixty-five. Not surprisingly, the amount correlates positively with education, income, and early reading habits. Adult readers of fiction are likely to be women, especially those who consider themselves heavy readers.
However, fiction accounts for somewhere between 15 and 25 percent of the world book production, which as recently as 1983 amounted to some 11.9 billion books, and over three-quarters of public library loans and about 70 percent of mass market paperbacks are fiction. As a conservative estimate, fiction reading occupies nearly an hour a day of the time of one-third of the adult population, so it is not a negligible phenomenon (Nell 1988, 18–25).
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- Information
- Becoming a ReaderThe Experience of Fiction from Childhood to Adulthood, pp. 155 - 194Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1991