Reading lifes / Lifes of reading

Abstract

The purposes of the article lay on the need to identify the causes behind the taste for reading, thus contributing to the construction of an acquisitive pattern of that taste and the variables there contained. This identification was based on the study of readers bearing high levels of literary reading, confirmed through the available data from the Municipal Libraries of Vila Franca de Xira and Loures. The article is based upon the following main aspects: expectations of success as for the beneficial results of reading (expectations of pleasures and/or usefulness); social and cultural determinisms; public mediators; private mediators; psycho-affective aspects; disruptions, turns or key-moments in one’s life story. The author infers, based on the interviews data, that the reading habit is the result of a successive and simultaneous procedure of various non necessarily coherent or similar references and stimulus, consolidated in a number of schemes or hybrid dispositions, which will be set in motion according to the realization contexts. Thus, is open the reflection about a reader formed not only as the expressions of an incorporated practical sense set automatically in motion by the social reproduction laws, but also as a memory in action and under construction, where the individual can reflexively built part of its own destiny. In this experiment, reading – in particular the escape reading – is mentioned in the statements as part of and identity construction/ reconstruction procedure, meaning, part of a process essential to the I self-discovery, other worlds and other consciences.