Novel Reading During the COVID-19 Pandemic

 So a very warm welcome, everyone.

Very good afternoon.

Yet another fascinating session of our Research Futures webinar today.

We have the pleasure we're delighted to welcome three colleagues, Christina Lupton, who's professor and director of the Institute of Modern Languages at the University of Copenhagen.

She's the author of three monographs, 'Knowing Books', 'Reading' and 'The Making of Time and Love and the Novel'.Johanne Gormsen Schmidt was a postdoc at the Institute of Modern Languages at the University of Copenhagen.

She works on her dissertation, was about The Art of Insignificance: Aesthetic and Practise at the Publishing House Basilik (2020), it's been well, I think, defended quite recently in 2020.

And she's now invested in the current efforts to combine sociology and literature.

She's editor of the literary journal Passage.

And we have our colleague from the University of Portsmouth, Dr Ben Davis who is a senior lecturer in English literature at the university, as I said.

He's the author of Sex, Time and Space in Contemporary Fiction, editor of John Burnside, and also co-editor of Sex, Gender and Time in Fiction and Culture.

What are we going to talk about today?

We are going to talk about novel reading the covid-19 pandemic.

This is a question I'm sure we're all interested in.

Have we read more?

What have we read?

Is it revealing of a crisis time?

Are we using different tools and so on and so forth.

So these questions are going to be addressed by our colleagues today.

As you know, I think my name is Leila Schekman, a professor of international law and director of the Democratic Citizenship theme of the University of Portsmouth.

One more time, a very warm welcome.

And we start with our colleague, Ben.

Ben the floor is yours Thank you Leila.

So first of all, just to say that the Tina is having difficulty getting into the meeting, so I've got her part of the presentation in front of me, so I'm going to read it out.

It's a bit strange because she talks about me in the third person, so just bear with me.

But so to begin with, what we're talking about today is a project, our project that's been going running now for about eight months, looking at the role that novel reading has played in the lives of readers during the pandemic in Denmark and England.

Oh, there's Tina.

I don't know if you want to carry on.

I just started.

So technical issues issue.

So Tina, if we can hear you that would be better.

You can hear me sorry, I just switched to Firefox and it worked.

Apologies everybody that's across the street.

So we have everybody.

Excuse me, please feel free to wear carry on.

We introduced everyone who is just starting the floor.

Is yours really, really are you sure Ben, you weren't in the middle of it?

Let's go for it.

Just go from the top.

  Alright.

Well, I apologise again.

I'll try and give a fairly condensed version of what we are going to say.

So basically we're reporting, as Ben has already suggested, on a project that's been running here in Denmark for the last eight months with Ben as our partner in England.

And the way we we sort of choreograph today was that I would begin by talking a little bit about the stakes of the project in disciplinary terms before handing over to Ben and Johhanne to talk a little bit about the things that the readers themselves that we've been talking to have told us.

But we thought, given the interdisciplinary nature of this group, that it might be interesting to try and situate ourselves in disciplinary terms before we deliver our findings, because obviously we are thinking about some readers and the reading that they've been doing.

But at a meta level, this raises questions about what literary study is and who should do it and what kind of literary study this is.

Given that we have literature in the picture, but only in some ways as a sort of accessory to the sociological quest of trying to find out what it is that people have been doing with the books that they read this year under these kind of strange historical conditions.

So Ben and I set about applying for money for this project last summer, and we knew that we wanted to do this, this kind of data collection.

We wanted to contribute to what we imagined would be this archive of interesting material that 2020 was going to produce.

But our own experience as literary critics was a shared interest in the fact that we both worked on reading as a kind of interface with time.

In my case, I had written about the history of people finding time to read in the 18th and 19th centuries and the way that reading itself always represents a kind of surplus of time in excess of the things that it reports on.

So I saw book reading as this kind of utopian prospect where in the future, where we all read more, we'd also have to have more time to read.

And I saw saw that kind of utopianism built in almost to the the form of the Codex book is this thing that we carried around with us waiting to have time to read it, and Ben was working at a very different a very different historical moment with contemporary fiction.

But his readings of of recent novels, which I admired very much as a critic, were readings that presented the reader as someone who was has kind of exceptional relationship to the text or the story that's being told.

So to give some examples of where that comes into play for us this year, if you have a reader, if you have if what you're reading is a novel in which the representation of a situation in which there's no sense, there's no logic, there's a kind of claustrophobia to one's experience, let's say, of a pandemic or of being inside with your children day after day.

That experience, once it's turned into a reading and process, as somebody reading a book, is already different from the way it would look in the raw.

It's already become a more linear form of experience, a more organised form of experience, perhaps a more utopian form of experience, and the experience that's being described and that the characters in the book are having.

So that's just to give you one example of the kinds of of reading that Ben and I have in common, I guess, as literary critics.

But this already made us somewhat unusual amongst our colleagues at that point.

When I started reading Ben's work, I was I was working in at Warwick and I I felt that in England, typically in our discipline, in the discipline of literary criticism, scholars were focussed either on literary content or on the reception and the sort of mediation of literature.

So it's to give an example that gets us a bit closer to our subject today.

I felt, you know, literary critics who were trying to look at something like the representation of pandemic or plague in literature would probably look first to novels that featured plague or pandemic.

That would be where you would go if a Ph.D.

student came, said, 'oh, I'm a literary critic who is interested in in the representation of of plague in literature', you'd start giving, you know, giving them a list of apocalyptic and post apocalyptic fictions where that was the subject matter.

And they might then use Bakhtin or Foucault or other sort of literary critic critical sort of tools to decode that representation of fictional disaster.

That they would be keyed into their material through the topic.

Or you might get someone who was much more sort of historical, who was looking, for instance, at an actual event in history like the Spanish flu, and was interested in fictional representations of that moment.

So they would be looking at this early 20th century literature where the effects of the Spanish flu on a society populations were showing up in fictional terms.

They might be connecting that to archives of the moment.

This would be a sort of typical literary approach to that topic.

And then you might also have found in literature departments that I knew someone, you know, you would find people who saw themselves more as book historians.

And they might be looking, let's say, the publication of material from the 1920s in relation to the Spanish flu.

They might be looking at the materiality of text and its production in relation to, say, medical discourse or pamphlets or or things that were also circulating at the time.

And it would be perfectly legitimate in that kind of project for them not to be particularly interested in doing a reading of the novels that were circulating, but just to talk about a sort of particular kind of paperback circulation that was happening alongside the circulation of governmental advice about health, for instance, sort of interface between literature and public health.

And so that would put and then that kind of book historical approach that would be looking at the actual objects of literature intersects much, I think, quite closely with the more sociological approaches that hopefully we can talk about with with with you guys today.

But that would see scholars looking more broadly at circulation in social terms.

So, Jim English, whose work we've already used quite a bit in this project, is very interested in the role of the online platform Goodreads in shaping literary taste today.

And he does this kind of data scraping where he looks at the way that reader's tastes sort of converge and is shaped on this very big data scale by what we see circulating in a in a forum like Goodreads.

And obviously there's all kinds of sociological work that's got to be done about the reading that's happened this year that's going to use big numbers.

Look at to look at what's sold and how it's sold and what's been downloaded and what's what's borrowed and search terms.

This kind of material, this kind of approach that will produce, of course, the description of the the sort of reading landscape.

But Ben and Johanne and I all come as critics who are actually interested in putting as sort of reading skills to work more closely in what we're doing.

And so we are interested in sort of getting up to speed with these kind of sociological approaches.

But we really want to think about the way that the texts themselves resonate with the different situations that they're being read in.

So obviously, you know, what we've ended up trying to do is to think about a blending of the two methodological approaches that I've just described to you that would allow us to keep working with the text themselves in a kind of literary critical perspective to think about what a text that people tell us they've been reading a lot of, like Jane Eyre or Camus's The Plague or [inaudiable] fiction about sort of family life.

What does it do to what we think about the way that those texts mean to put them into this specific, specific historical moment, to think about some of the actual sort of choreography of reading under these particular conditions, of these really locked down lives?

What do we have in common as historical subjects who are going through this moment and have to adapt our reading practises to these very particular circumstances?

So these are the kind of questions that for us have a bearing not just on on sort of the description of society, but also on the description of what those texts themselves begin to mean under these particular circumstances.

So already we've been trying this out and thinking about what it means to to think about the meaning of a text like Camus's The Plague, for instance, where it's obvious that that text was written with with all kinds of 20th century historical conditions in mind, largely as a sort of allegorical text.

But for many people this year, it's showing up as a very literal experience.

Well, what does it mean to you to think about Jane, Jane Eyre as the text that people are reading suddenly keyed in to its very particular kinds of claustrophobia and limited horizon?

How does the meaning of that text actually change?

Because people are reading it in these ways.

So that's just to try and situate this.

And now I'm going to hand over to Ben, who's going to try and talk about what it's what the data that we've actually been working with when we've been asking ourselves these questions of what what we're up to in a sort of methodological way.

So, as Tina mentioned, our research supports what we saw initially in terms of biblio-metric data on the increase of the reading and book sales over the past 12 months.

But more importantly, doing the interviews enabled us to explore in depth how and why people turn to novels during lockdown.

And in particular, those interviews have shown that the idea that novel reading is mere entertainment or pleasure is actually quite reductive and often misconstrued or misplaced.

So the interviews have given us sort of valuable insights into how people have lived with and turn to and used novels under the specific conditions of lockdown.

And we've been able to look at what literature has done and meant for them during the past 12 months.

And in this sense, it resonates with what the French critic Marseilles says and she says and she writes that 'literature doesn't stand on one side and life on the other, we encounter forms intrinsic to life when we read.' So books and readers in the tools, terms, if you like, a part of complex social networks.

And that's something that's become very apparent during the work we've been doing.

And so just to give some sort of flavour to this, I just want to look at two particular strands that have come up time and again.

One is the relationship between reading and time and the other is reading in relation to BLM, the protests last year.

So one of the recurring themes generally in any sort of lock down analysis has been a focus on time, and this has largely been due to changes in people's routines, whether they've been furloughed or whether they've stopped commuting or on the other hand, if they've been sort of home schooling 24/7 and had a sort of hectic blur between life and work.

So a lot of the interviewees talked about gaining time to read and others sort of lost a lot of time.

And what's interesting is the way in which certain writers responded to this.

So the Brazilian writer Fuks described how the future seemed to 'cancel itself out'.

And the academic Thomas Allen described the pandemic as 'a strange interregnum'.

And he said this is largely due to the fact that temporal situationist depends on our interactions with others.

So when we lose the interaction, the sense of time itself can be diminished.

And in terms of reading, lockdown down from the very beginning, often associated with a particular type of bookish activity, which is the long read and the big book or The Big Classic.

So from the very beginning, there are lots of newspaper articles last March saying that now was the perfect time to read War and Peace and Ulysses.

Lockdown was supposed to give all of us time for sustained reading, and many of the interveiwees we've talked to talk to did buy into that logic.

And it's amazing how many people themselves challenges and targets to read.

But obviously, the reality is much more complex and nuanced, and it's often combined particularly with good intentions on the one hand, and feelings of guilt as well as pleasure.

So one local reader a woman in her 40s, for instance, turned exclusively to audio books in lockdown because that allowed her to multitask.

Where she perceives sitting down to read as being sort of inactive and lazy, but listening to thirty three hours of Anna Karenina on an audio book allowed her to do the housework as she said and also about her own desires for to sort of have an affair vicariously.

So she was able to combine the two in lockdown.

Another reader in Bournemouth actually said that the long read was much more problematic, so the idea of reading Hilary Mantel's The Mirror and the Light, which came out last year, was too much for her.

And I quote what she said.

She says,' I thought, what if I die before I get to the end of this book?

I couldn't die and not know what happened'.

So often, literary critics talk about reaching the end of the book as a sort of metaphorical death in which you can look back on the whole text and this sort of mode of what they call the anticipation of retrospection, i.e.

that you finish it and you can understand the whole novel at a glance.

But here, the actual fear of dying due to Coivd, stopped this person from reading at all, reading this long book because she didn't want to be she didn't want herself to die in the midst of narrative.

So there are lots of obstacles, physical and practical and psychological, even though some people did have more time to read.

And I think it's interesting to just draw out two observations at this point.

One is that these declarations early on about Lock Down and the Long Read show the necessity of having time to read, that's one aspect.

And the other is that it also suggests that narrative plays a role, this particular role in times of uncertainty.

And what we've seen in this particular moment is that often when there have been no future horizon, readers and writers have repeatedly shown a desire for narrative structure.

So Rachel Clark writes in Breathtaking, which was published just before Christmas, which is her account of actually working in the NHS during the pandemic.

She writes and I quote, 'From the perspective of its main protagonist, this pandemic has no plot, no motive, no narrative arc whatsoever.

The new coronavirus is a scrap of protein and genetic material mindlessly replicating its way through the world'.

And she in that book, she describes a desire and again, this is a quotation to 'document the rawness of time of this time', but she actually ends up using very conventional plots and narrative devices, relying on it actually comes across as being quite clunky.

So this idea of rawness actually gives way to convention.

But I think one of the reasons for this turn to novels, perhaps, is to do with the fact of the way in which written narratives work.

So unlike in life and indeed in oral storytelling, written narratives are completed, their futures are set out and fixed.

Mark Curry talks about this in terms of a block like universe structure.

After all, events in a novel have sort of ontological equivalency and the feature set.

And I think, against this sort of background of continuous news updates and doom scrolling of the past year, this is perhaps been one of the reasons why readers have turned to narrative fiction in particular.

So turning to the second strand, which is reading novels and BLM.

Many of our interviewees discussed how they read novels in order to learn and educate themselves so to encounter and to immerse themselves, basically, to challenge themselves, to think.

And they particularly discussed the way in which they made a deliberate effort to choose works by black authors in the wake of George Floyd's murder and the BLM protests last year.

So as one reader put it, I quote, she says, 'I'm really sick of reading books by white men'.

And for her, the intensity of being locked down drove a desire to open up and to sort of expand her horizons, and she said she hadn't really felt that previously.

And many of our interviewees also discussed the tension between wanting to participate and be active in last year's protests, but on the other hand, having the constraints of lockdown.

So a woman in the north of England said that she didn't feel comfortable going on marches due to Covid.

But at the very least, she says, I could learn more and also put money towards black owned bookshop.

And I think in this sense, a lot of these reading practises chime with Toni Morrison's understanding of how and she says this in her Harvard lectures, 'that narrative fiction provides a controlled wilderness, an opportunity to be and to become the other the stranger with sympathy, clarity and the risk of self-examination'.

And a lot of the readers we interviewed talked about testing themselves to seek out more diverse writers, to read fiction about other lives, historic and present day struggles, and of doing so at a time in which they felt physically limited and constrained and locked down.

So they were using these novels, in Morrison's sense of trying to step into some sort of controlled wilderness with all the certain privileges and safety that that obviously entails.

So I think reading here actually becomes the opposite of escape.

There's a deliberate sort of reading in order to encounter other lives, other forms of being, of exploring social and political identity.

But even readers who did talk about reading to escape often made quite interesting comments which show that this idea of escape is much more nuanced and problematic than often we give it credit.

So one self isolating reader in London explained that he deliberately really read Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate to escape lockdown by deliberately enter a situation which was much more horrific, i.e.

the Battle of Stalingrad.

So this is this is an escape into a sort of devastation, if you like.

So I think what some of these interviews have shown is that whilst it is fun and imitating to read novels, and I think that's something to celebrate, they also show that people live and read live with books for a whole variety of reasons and turn to novels in what we might call a variety of the uses of literature.

So what we've seen just to conclude is that people have used novels as forms of self care, of caring for others.

A lot of people have talked about reading as a as a method of parenting.

So joint reading or shared reading.

And they also indicate, as I said, the importance of having time to read novels more generally and hopefully beyond the specific conditions of the past 12 months, and I hand over to Johanne, for the third section.

Thank you, Ben.

In this final section of the talk, I'll give you some examples from our Danish material based on a survey and 30 interviews.

In both Denmark and the U.K., our data shows readers have turned to fiction and used it as a way to cope both with the pandemic and with the changed daily lives and routines.

In this presentation, I'll focus and just two strengths.

And as I talk, I'll bring in quotes from the same few interviewees who you'll then hopefully get to know a bit.

The first strand is about reading in the private sphere and about the private sphere.

In particular, parents reading about parenting under lockdown.

In the second strand.

I'll talk about the new kinds of reading communities we've seen in 2020.

In Denmark, children are usually sent to day-care institutions from when they are 10 months old, which is when the paid parental leave ends.

So most Danish pre-school children are away from the home for many hours during the week.

Therefore, when Denmark and its welfare institutions went into lockdown, it was a shock for Danish families and something that also affected their reading habits.

The reader, Adam, describes it like this: "It was absolutely awful, so I stopped reading the day Mette Frederiksen, the Danish prime minister, closed Denmark.

It was really bad because we were suddenly going to look after our children at home.

We have a two year old and a five year old at the same time.

We had to keep working.

I have a full time job".

After a while, Adam started reading again, now using reading as a way to add some structure to his unstructured days.

"I somehow tried to find a new rhythm.

He says,.

For instance, he would plan time in his calendar for reading and he would plan to go somewhere to read typically to the woods sitting on a bench as there was nowhere else to go?

One of the works he read was My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgard, who writes extensively about the daily life with small children at home.

To read Knausgard was a bit therapeutic in terms of feeling that you're in the same boat.

Adam says and goes on.

"I think that in a lot of ways and characterised by Corona and an everyday life with jobs and young children, reading fiction can maintain focus and maintain the longer, deeper conversation over time." Another reader, Devika, mother of three small children, found a similar taste for Knuasgard under lockdown.

"It's something that speaks to the brain, but also to questions like how do you make it work when you are a lot of people in a small apartment." She says, and goes on: "That doubleness of being extremely absorbed in one's children and at the same time being a mental escapist who gets up early in the morning just to read 200 pages.

I recognise myself in that.

And it applies extremely well to this time where ambitions can really be outgoing." As Ben also noted, for some, lockdown has offered plenty of spare time, well, for others, like these parents, Tom has been in short supply and they've had to make reading possible, as Devika tells.

"I've just restructured my time really hardcore.

So it's only been devoted to the children work and reading.

When the kids went on the trampoline, for instance, I could read a bit.

Some of it has been these small moments of reading,.

She says.

And these moments have been crucial to her.

She goes on,.

"I've always read a lot and it probably comes back when it matters.

So I think it has been a survival strategy that sounds very dramatic.

But I've had this reading breaks and listening breaks, I think, to create a mental space.

Many readers have used audiobooks to be able to create that space inside their homes.

This also applies to the reader Mayar who reports.

"In the spring, I had to deal with three unruly boys at home.

Oh, I could get tired of it.

So when there was a lunch break, I said, do what you want.

I don't care.

I'm listening to an audiobook.

Let me know if the house is on fire." So within these confined spaces in which childcare work and private life have been one big mess, readers have turned to reading to find a room for themselves and for reflection.

Not just reading, but also the conversation about reading has been valuable to readers and the lockdown, and this leads me to the second strand of my talk, the reading communities that have actually flourished under lockdown in new virtual forms.

It's not surprising that many readers have been much more active in online forums about books in 2020 when physical meetings have been cancelled.

What's striking is the positive experiences of these digital alternatives.

It's not just the next best thing readers.

Still, it's something else that affords new ways of engaging and connecting.

When using these online platforms, reader's tend to combine many different kinds of communities, so, for instance, the big website Goodreads, which the literary scholar James English has recently examined issues side by side with other with, for instance, book clubs and Instagram booktube and YouTube and all kinds of informal Facebook groups eagerly discussing literature.

Many Danish readers also shuttled between Danish and Anglophone forums, so the Danish part is very international as well.

Digital literary events like festivals have also been popular amongst Danish readers.

It's just very convenient to click on an online event at 8pm from your couch when the kids have been put to bed, something Deveke for instance, did a lot.

She reflects: "I used to think of that type of event as more social, but I realised that I can also just do it myself.

And many seem to like that, similarly, Maya notes about her newfound enthusiasm for online reading communities.

"You're not emotionally committed to the people on Facebook, so you can let fiction take up all the space.

Nobody writes on a wall in an online literature group.

'I'm sad today'.".

The online format seems to allow for a space that's only dedicated to the discussion of fiction and nothing else, something that's really been valued under lockdown at the same time.

It's a very open space, a far reaching space that lets readers cross borders while staying home.

And it's difficult to imagine that these activities will decrease in the near future.

Our data shows that in a time of crisis, fiction and the conversation about it have proven to be an essential activity rather than a mere luxury.

And this insight seems important also when considering what reading might look like and how we might think of reading after Lockdown.

Thank you all for listening.

Fantastic, thank you so much Johanne! Thanks very much to all of you.

Would you have a sort of word of conclusion or are we moving to the questions and answers?

I think we can move to Q&A.

Excellent.

So I see that we are receiving some questions, but I have a few for you a;ready.

I think it was really fascinating, very complimentary perspective.

Also the sort of international comparison obviously you are in between literature and sociology.

I was very interested in what she said about time.

My first question, maybe it's a silly question because there is nothing comparable, but however do you have a comparison?

Because crisi is not the first crisis it is the first maybe contemporary pandemic, but there are crises all the time.

Do you have a comparison with what we do in times of war, for example?

Because war is I'm afraid to all over.

Have you have you worked on that?

I mean, shall I take it, guys?

OK, OK, I mean, I think that it would be possible.

I mean, I think the comparative element would be interesting.

But already what I can see as the the features of this particular experience that are unique and which are coming up again and again in our interviews have to do with something, I mean, I don't want to say boredom, but with this sort of, you know, the monotony of of these long, long lockdown experiences and then of the merging of work and and leisure in this sort of messy overlap that we get when our homes become these these sort of endless cycles of of online, you know, activity.

And I, I don't think that these particular conditions have ever happened before.

So if it's those conditions that we're paying attention to, along with what Johanne talked about in terms of these sort of online communities, then I think they are they are quite different from the conditions of war, for example.

I mean, in some ways, the the obvious comparison might be to sort of prisoners or something.

And I think I mean, there is interesting work done on the use of narrative and art in prisons.

And I mean, we have talked a little bit about about some of that work that's being done.

And I think that would almost be a more appropriate comparison in some ways.

Yeah, particularly in terms of time, people like Lisa [Inadudible] have talked about that sense of time, which focuses on prisoners held in isolation, and then Niccola Fleetwood's book on African-American art in prison also talks about prison time in the same sort of way.

But obviously, there are also differences there between being locked down in your house and being on death row or whatever.

So but it does it does throw up interesting sort of overlaps as well as differences.

Yeah.

Yeah, indeed, Johanne do you want to add anything to that?

Well, I agree with Ben and Tina , but I was also thinking about we've all read a novel called The Pool of the Stars (Emma Donoghue).

I can't remember the name of the author, but it's about the Spanish flu, which took place at the same time as World War One.

So it's also like, yeah, it's a matter of perspective and.

Yeah, because when.

Yeah.

And the Spanish flu actually killed more people than World War One and and yeah.

We just because the Spanish flu has actually come up a lot also when like in our interviews, something people started finding interest in and also realising that event as it's very important in a time where World War One was also going on and that's what we would usually talk about when be the nineteen hundred and eighteen, it's World War One, but it's also the Spanish flu.

Yeah, I don't yeah.

It's more just like this.

That is the way the axis of comparison historically is through our readers themselves who are looking for those kind of comparisons.

So we have found ourselves thinking about other periods that are represented in literature as sort of catastrophic in these ways.

And Amanda, who you can see the other person is our other our other partner who was presenting today because she's already presented this week, but she's been working on plague fiction from the past.

And so people are looking looking for those comparisons in their own reading.

And I guess as as we work at the sort of meta level, we're sort of thinking comparatively through their eyes rather than in our terms as researchers.

I mean, I think we are definitely interested in the way people are engaging with the past.

Thanks very much.

I see that some people have raised their hand, so because I might not see everyone, could you try to use the chat box to ask you questions?

Just easier.

However, I see the hand of Christine and Rob.

So, Christine, would you like to ask your question then?

You are muted .

So I thought the bottom, if you want to unmute yourself.

All right, so let's get the question of Robert and Christine, we get back to you.

Robert, would you like to ask a question?

Hiya, thank you so much for your presentations really enjoyed those?

I was going to pick up some of the responses and times of sort of parallels because I've looked at the research, look at popular fiction and reading habits in the early 20th century and the issue about war and what people did at war time.

There are obviously key differences, as you said, that there are parallels in the sense that there was a lot of boredom associated with war too.

ARP wardons sitting around doing nothing and they were picking up novels to help them pass the time.

So there are lots of parallels as well.

The question I wanted to ask you was one of the things which I found lots of people said that I write for was sort of as a coping mechanism along with other things that you said, too.

Did you find that people were reading to help them cope either with the domestic situation or just the pandemic itself, sort of finding a way through it?

Did you find that as well?

I'm sorry if I missed it, if you did say that.

But in short, the answer is yes.

There are lots of people reading as a way to cope.

It was partly to do some some aspects of that were to do with deliberately seeking out novels about plague.

Some people found that quite therapeutic and other did the complete opposite and didn't want to read any novel to do with apocalypse or plague or death as well.

But what came up a lot in the interviews was that I talked a little bit about is the need for some sort of structure, and the narrative structure seemed to be quite consoling in that way.

Whereas day by day, particularly if you think back to the early days of the pandemic, there was a lot of information and misinformation sort of almost constantly coming out.

So reading is as a form of therapy was also important.

And with that, we also noted a lot of people rereading.

So one of the chapters we've we've written is about rereading Jane Eyre and a lot of people deliberately rereading novels that read particularly as teenagers and as a way to sort of go back and into a sort of calmer, happier time.

So, yeah, and also for therapy for others.

A lot of parents talked about reading to their children and having a sort of shared experience, and that was sort of therapy for both parties.

I'm just thanking Ben.

Cheers, sorry.

But maybe I can add I think a lot of readers have definitely been using reading as a way to cope with their daily lives at home and actually read fiction that addresses the experience of of being trapped at home.

In Denmark right now there's a big trend in contemporary fiction that deals with the expense of being on parental leave.

And a lot of readers in 2020 have read these kinds of work because, of course, a very much plays into the experience of lockdown where a lot of people have suddenly found themselves trapped at home, like when you are a parent taking care of a small baby for an extended period of time and yeah, having to stay at home with that baby.

And there's been a lot of readers who have brought that up in our conversations.

I'm in [inaudibale], a Danish novelist called Olga Ravn a novel called My Work (The Employees) in English in 2020.

And it has been a really big hit, a bestseller.

And it is about a long experience of being on parental leave and kind of the experience of losing a sense of time and losing the sense of structured time and how to deal with that.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Thank you very much, everyone.

Good to see many parallels with some of the stuff I've looked at and not sqcraffingabout focus of evidence from history sort of thing but you are creating your own database aren't you?

Yeah I just I want to ask you Rob about your methods, because, of course, we're fascinated about thinking ahead to historians in 50 years.

Are we going to make their lives easier like we go to produce something that they could use as well?

Yeah, very much.

I mean, the evidence of the use is Mass Observation, which is a project run from the late 30s into the war period where they looked at people's leisure habits as well as lots of other things, they asked people about their reading habits, while they read and that sort of stuff.

So this serious that that's one of the main resources that I can use because there's so little.

So you're creating its own base database, which for historians of the future would be fantastic.

It's great now, but for historians of the future it'll be fantastic.

They'll be thanking you for that.

So great stuff.

And so we do have a question from Christine.

And she apologised.

She couldn't use the microphone to question is the following, though I'm not sure there is an answer to it yet.

Do you think that the pandemic has changed habits as far as reading, but also literary events are concerned for good?

I'm thinking about or of literary prises, for instance, the Women's Prize was streamed online last autumn, which meant that the readers from all over the world could join and make the prize.

Yeah.

And shortlisted novels by extension more accessible so it has a changed literary habits and prizes in particular?

Well, this is just asking us to kind of prophesies along with everybody else of aid at the moment, I would put my money on yes.

In good and bad ways.

I mean, I think we are going to find ourselves now in a century.

And we're just at the beginning, I think, of a century where a lot of events now will will continue in their online format for new reasons.

And I guess we're going to see what that means.

But I would say yes.

I mean, I think literary prize events are just the tip of the iceberg.

Events like this, the the sort of the we're in now, probably the bread and butter kind of stuff of that.

So, yeah, I mean, I'm in university management at the moment and all the indicators at that at this level are that people want to continue for different reasons with a lot of these kinds of online events.

Yeah.

I know also many of the Danish readers we've interviewed have been very happy that they've suddenly been able to participate in an international literary festival like the Hay Festival and Edinburgh Festival.

And yeah, it's something that would have been impossible for them a couple of years ago.

And I think especially for for for Danish readers and Denmark with a small language, it's really like a whole new world that opens up with these online events.

Just because Christine's first part of the question is about reading habits, so I just speak to that.

Again, that's trying to sort of predict the future.

But what a lot of the people we interviewed talked about was wanting to continue reading more when life, in inverted commas goes back to normal.

Having read more during this period, they said they wanted to read more and carry on doing that.

They realised how good it had been for them.

A lot of people taking up reading sort of for the first time were coming back to it after a break.

But obviously that that goes back to that sort of tension between good intentions and reality.

So when people are back to commuting and so on and so forth, whether they factor in that sort of desire and are able to carry it out is another question.

But almost all of the readers we talked to said that they wanted this to continue.

And and it's also interesting to think about the pieces that have come through in terms of how sort of good reading has been for mental health and so on and so forth throughout the pandemic.

Governments have talked about this.

But again, governments are quite quick to forget when it comes to certain forms of art and the humanities.

So I'd rely more on the people than the government for that, I think would be my answer.

But are just to pick up on that, Ben.

Yeah, I think also many of the readers we've talked to, they they really like thought more about themselves as readers, they've been more reflective, also thought about like, why, what do I gain from reading?

And they've looked at their own bookshelves.

And it's also in a way to look at themselves as readers and come to know themselves better as readers.

And I don't think after lockdown you don't just lose that.

You take that with you.

Yeah.

Hopefully.

We have a few more questions.

Thanks very much for these answers.

The first question from Barnaby and he was asking, how wide was your surveying of the public?

Do you plan to open up to this more widely?

Well, we sort of went the other way because early on there were sort of huge surveys done by the book, The Reading Agency, which was a nationwide survey and other surveys of that type.

So then we sort of followed up with our own survey in both countries, which I think roughly garnered around 800 or thousand responses, and it tallied with what those larger surveys said in terms of opening up more widely.

There was this strange event that happened during this project where we were contacted by who turned out to be the Duchess of Cornwall, and they put the survey on their Instagram feed, which had sort of ninety one thousand followers.

So in terms of opening up to as many people as possible, those are some of the ways in which we did that.

The survey is closed now.

And I think the question may also be pointing to like maybe possibly international comparisons or global comparisons.

But we've got we're dealing with two countries is enough at this point.

So I think it's fair to say.

And so we're not going to open up more widely in that sense.

We may undertake more interviews and follow up with people who have already responded.

So that's that's some that's what we'd say in response to Barnaby's question.

Thank you very much then, certainly it was a very noted study, as you said, in the U.K.

in particular.

That's good to say that.

But not only a question from Denel.

Johanne spoke about shared reading on social media.

Can you elaborate on the demographics of your participants and which social media platform they use?

Yes, the demographic of our participants, that means.

Who they are, where they are, where they live, and, yeah, so, so.

The readers in our survey, they live in.

Yeah, and then it's not just Copenhagen readers, there's a big diversity in the group geographically and also in terms of educational background.

And, yeah, a lot of them talked about this online reading community.

And I think, um.

Yeah, to elaborate on that, what I think what was very interesting is that that they really moved between many different kinds of platforms.

So a reader who uses good reads will typically also use a lot of other forums to discuss literature.

And I think especially the Facebook groups, there's a very big Facebook group in Denmark called the Literature Club or in Danish 'litteraturklubben'.

And it has.

And a lot of members and there are all sorts of readers and the chat in there is really informal and free and not dictated by any like a discourse defined by the educational system.

It's it's really just like readers sharing their experiences and everybody is invited in and allowed to speak.

So I think it's yeah, it's a um especially to the Facebook groups, I think the format of that invites a very free way of  sharing reading experiences and.

I don't know if you want to...

Instagram and bookstagtam or is is another very popular site and Goodreads, of course, which I didn't really know much about until this project.

And it's interesting to see people use Goodreads in all different ways.

One is to sort of find book recommendations.

One is to post recommendations.

And also a lot of people use and use it to log their reading.

And this may sort of respond to the question about journaling and diary keeping, which is also in the chat.

Actually, a lot of the people we interviewed use logs, whether they're writing down what they've read on paper or using app.

So I know there are digital apps and phone apps as a way to sort of keep a track record of what they've read, not just during the pandemic, but as a sort of book diary.

So I think that's quite interesting, that sort of tracking and logging and sort of keeping a track of their experiences, if you like.

It becomes another form of journaling and its own right.

So very interesting and indeed a transition to Paul's question, just a question about comparing reading to other behaviours like exercise.

I also wonder how people make sense of their experience, like journaling or keeping a journal, etc..

You started to respond Ben, but what about you Tina and Johanne you have a comparable response?

Well, I mean, I was thinking about that in relation to the question of whether people will keep reading, I mean, obviously there's also the question of whether people will keep doing yoga at home or keep knitting or keep cooking really complicated Ottolenghi recipes or whatever it is people have taken up under lockdown.

I think, you know, for us, there are some very there are some very particular features of fiction reading that make it a extremely complicated coping mechanism, as we were talking about, but also a sensemaking mechanism that means that it exceeds as an activity some of these other forms of of life that have sprung into focus under lockdown.

But obviously, if we were purely sort of sociological, we would be looking, I guess, you know, at these a broader range of activities.

What I would say from the literary critical perspective is that many of these texts that have become sort of focal points of reading under in the in the pandemic will have also acquired new kinds of significance, new meaning, new relevance.

And the interesting thing for me is also to think about how those texts will carry on into the next generation of readers as as sort of accumulation points for that kind of interpretive experience so that, you know, it's not just that we see a spike in people reading Jane Eyre or The Plague.

We also see those texts being reinvigorated for a new generation of readers or overlawyered with an experience of 2020 that they didn't have before.

I mean, texts are very, very complicated objects.

If one begins thinking about them sociologically in those terms and and what they mean and how they signify in the future is, I think, also at stake in in how they're being read and talked about now.

So so so I do think there's only one form of activity.

I don't want to claim primacy for them in any any way like that.

But I do think as an activity in the sort of hierarchy of values that they occupy, a reading occupies a very high position.

And it has forever since there's been sort of books around reading has been one of the things that people talk about wanting to do if they have time, who wanting to have more time in order to do so.

There's something special, I think, in our in our sort of cultural history about reading in that position.

It leads me to what might be the last question, because I'm conscious of time, but, you know, you mentioned the essentiality, the essential character of reading.

So what about that?

Because it's been very different from one country to the other.

In the U.K., it was not particularly considered as "essential".

I know that in France, after some lobbying and protestation, the second/third lockdown bookshop have been considered as essential shops.

So how do you see that?

You started again to to respond Johanne and Tina.

But how do you see this essential character?

Well, I would say government governments don't get the last word on this.

I mean, what we see is, you know, one of the interesting things I mean, Ben and Johanne can say more about this as well, but I mean, one of the things that we've learnt as researchers is that so much of the reading that happened, at least this time last year was reading that people did because they went to their own book collections.

And that doesn't show up in terms of any kind of policy decision about where people how people are accessing books.

It's a very low visibility kind of activity if you're reading books that you already own.

But the fact that people did so much of that, I think is obviously about the fact that it wasn't so easy to access books in that moment.

So it may be that the, you know, the French classification of bookshops as essential services produced a different kind of consumption.

Whereas in the U.K.

where bookshops were closed, we saw people turning to their own resources.

That's interesting, right?

But it doesn't it doesn't change one way or another.

I think whether people were able to access books in one way or another.

Sure.

But don't you think it changes what or how literature, fiction, non-fiction is perceived and what we want to show and send as a message and how we educate people as well?

I mean, not everything comes from the people.

You also have the rule of politics.

Yeah, I mean, obviously, particularly as a parent, I would say I think bookshops should have been open all along for, you know, I mean, so much was done also to create access to library collections.

And people really did switch in to becoming virtual users of virtual library collections that accelerated that tendency.

So access to books was a complicated thing.

But if you're asking whether I think governments should have classified books as essential services, yes, of course I do.

But again, I would say, you know, it's not the only it's not the only decisive factor in people's behaviour.

So, yeah.

Ben and Joanna, would you like to add  something on this notion of book reading being essential or something else maybe you would like to conclude?

I think it's essential, but I think that it's probably stating the obvious, given my background.

But what I think comes across as actually how many of the respondents saw it as essential.

And people did pick up on what you talked about in terms of France declaring or trying to declare bookshops of essential resources and one thing I probably wasn't expecting before doing interviews was how emotional they could often be, particularly when you're talking to older people on their own and how important libraries are.

And libraries, again, were closed for a long period of time.

And for a lot of readers, again, it's not just about reading.

It's actually about the access to book browsing physically and holding books.

A lot of readers talked about the importance of books as objects.

And I know we see that in other forms, particularly on Zoom, with the Zoom bookcase background and that sort of thing.

But a lot of people talked about the the sort of physical act of holding books and the importance of that.

But that also chimes in with a long history of the danger of books being seen as carriers of certain viruses throughout history as a danger.

So that sort of resonated quite a lot with the current moment.

And people talked about ordering books of Amazon and then leaving them in the garage for two days before they open them.

But there is a long established history of that type of viral transmission, or at least the fear of it.

That's fascinating, that's a topic for another research, really.

Yeah, that's a Leah Price is working on that right now.

So that's that's an interesting kind of partner conversation in a way.

Johanne would like to ask, to add something.

Well, if we try to think about what we mean when we say that reading is an essential activity, a lockdown have actually showed how essential it really is because in a situation like lockdown where the coordinates that usually structure our lives have stopped working, then reading fiction has really like appears to be a basic need for many readers, something they they've turned to to to make sense of the situation, because, as Ben also said earlier, and fiction and narrative is basically structured time.

So it's a way to to when you turn to fiction, you can kind of it can help you regain this sense of structured time in a in a situation where you feel completely disoriented.

Yeah.

So thank you so much.

I don't want to frustrate Enel.

(Audience member) a comment.

"Of course, it's essential for readers.

But what about the folks who don't identify as a reader?" 

That's indeed where, you know, a number of things come into play, including politics and pushing people to read.

But, well, we have plenty more questions.

The idea of audiobook as well is it really reading?

You know, I don't personally, but you may disagree, as I'm sure you were working on that intensely.

Right.

So that was really fantastic.

Thank you so much.

We are going to certainly keep an eye on what you're producing.

I'm sure you're going to produce multiple scientific articles.

And why not issue books on your project?

Thank you very much again for your participation.

Really fascinating discussion.

I'd like to thank also the team of the university in particular for their support.

I'm thinking about He, Gloria, Barnaby, Olga in particular.

And thanks very much to the audience for being so interested and participating, asking so many lovely question.

Thanks for having us.

I'm sure you're going to grab a book maybe.