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Lost in a Book: The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure
Examines the social forces that have shaped reading, discusses the nature of reading skills, and suggests connections between reading and dreaming and hypnotic trance
352 pages, Paperback
First published September 10, 1988
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
December 25, 2009
Victor Nell seeks to answer basic questions about how and why people read for pleasure in this book. He covers both theory and empirical research competently and from a variety of perspectives. The focus of much of this work is on the voracious readers who congregate at Goodreads, so I am a bit surprised it is not reviewed more frequently here.
January 2, 2012
I don't have a background in psychology, so for me this book was quite dense. It is strongest when it reviews the literature on cognitive processes of reading; I found it to be sensitive and thorough, with some welcome influence from literary theory. Probably I'm not qualified to judge, but the empirical sections seemed to detail a lot of effort tainted by shoddy experiment design. I doubt that many people are still reading a study that came out of South Africa in the 1980s, but I found it helpful and would recommend it.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews