Lockdown Experiences of Social Reading

This chapter examines a number of related issues and findings concerned with the social aspect of reading and how the pandemic may have altered the ways that participants accessed books and discussed their reading with others. We first explore both the personal and social practices of reading, examining what we know about reading in social contexts. We examine how COVID-19 undoubtedly affected the ways in which these practices are conceived and undertaken by readers, highlighting the increased affordances of online tools such as Zoom and MS Teams to set up virtual reading groups. We then turn to our data to consider two specific questions, comparing reported behaviours pre- and during the pandemic: participants’ preferred way of reading; and how frequently and in what formats they talked about their reading with others. The chapter thus explores the extent to which participants perceived the pandemic had affected the specific formats and situations in which books were read and or discussed.