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Old 30-11-2014, 19:04   #20
Eric
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Re: What are your reading habits?

There is a problem with the question "What are your reading habits?" What we read and enjoy reading is not a habit; and there is little personal about it. Language itself is, primarily, a survival advantage. Those of our remote ancestors who developed language had an advantage over those who didn't. Hunting and gathering were more efficient with language. Trial and error in the choice of what was safe to eat and what was not did work, sort of. But if one's extended family or clan could, through language, teach the young what was nourishing and what was poison, the survival rate of the adept was always higher. Eventually reading developed as social groups became tribes and then nations. Oral communication and oral transmission of "history" was rendered ineffective. Stuff developed ... Once you have, for example, the Lascaux cave paintings, the I-Phone is inevitable.

It's also worth considering that whenever we read, we change what is written and intended to be understood. I believe it was Terry Eagleton (a Brit at Cambridge) who wrote "Every reading is a re-writing." If six of us were given the same Penguin version of "Emma" (I chose that because I have a big, fat, lovable cat of that name) none of us would read the same "book."

The word "book" is not as easy to define as we first assume. We know it exists as an artifact ... but if a book has, say, a million readers, it has a million different forms.

Sorry about all this ... but language and reading are much more complex than most people realize.
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