Reading Habits in the COVID-19 Pandemic

This book presents and analyses the results of the Lockdown Library Project survey, using a range of quantitative and qualitative approaches to provide a unique insight into the ways in which the first UK COVID-19 lockdown affected public reading habits. The authors begin by outlining the background to the study, the research methodology and design, and an overview of the headlines of the data, before going on to survey the literature on the relationship between pandemics, literature (especially the role played by genre and popular fiction) and reading habits. They then examine how participants reported that the lockdown period had affected the amount that they read; how they accessed books and discussed their reading with others; the use of reading as a coping strategy; and returning to re-read books that offered familiarity, reliability, and nostalgia. Finally, the concluding chapter brings together the overall findings of the project and briefly outlines future work in the field. This book will be of interest to academics in fields such as literary and genre studies, applied linguistics, corpus linguistics, stylistics, health humanities, and sociology, as well as practitioners working in education, in bibliotherapy, and in libraries.