Inauguration, Ludic Reading, and Why Novels are Addictive

Welcome to Weird Research, a blog dedicated to collecting, reviewing, and lampooning actual, peer-reviewed research across all academic disciplines. The only criterion is that they must be weird. It does not matter if the weirdness is found in the methodology, the assumptions, the subject, the language, or the results. 

The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure: Needs and Gratifications

Author(s): Victor Nell

Source: Reading Research Quarterly, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Winter, 1988), pp. 6-50

This unwieldy and weird study of “spontaneous pleasure reading,” also known as ludic reading apparently, has five (count ‘em) separate studies:

Reading for pleasure. Of course.

(1) reading ability and reading habits, (2) reader speed variability during natural reading, (3) reader rankings of books for preference, merit, and difficulty, (4) the physiology of ludic reading, and (5) the sovereignty of the reading experience. (6)

While it is not the weirdest of studies, it is a nice inauguration for the site because hopefully you will read this for pleasure. Spontaneously. And Victor Nell could not have guessed in his wildest dreams that any ludic reader may actually become “aroused” by his work.

Memorable Quotations: “[N]ewspaper and magazine readers are less dependent on their reading matter than book readers, who feel reading deprivation more keenly and take more vigorous action to end it. Perhaps the eighteenth-century critics were correct when they compared novel reading to tippling: Novels are addictive, whereas newspapers are not!” (14)

“[I]rrespective of career or language differences, females spend more time reading books than males; these differences carry over to other reading habit variables; and college males, of both language groups, read fewer books and for less time than the rest of the sample,” (14)

 “When the 33 ludic readers in this study were asked what percentage of their pleasure reading would be rated as "trash" by a suitably austere representative of elite culture, such as their high school English teacher, their mean rating was 42.6%,” (20-1).

“Clearly, substituting difficulty for literary merit is improper, and would lead to the conclusion that the poetry of T.S. Eliot and a Chevrolet workshop manual, being of equal difficulty, are of equal merit,” (30).

“The close association between difficulty and merit rankings supports the notion that these readers' value systems are under the sway of the Protestant ethic conviction that pain and virtue are allied,” (31).

“Ockert is the model for a gluttonous reader, a text gobbler who swallows books whole, achieving that pinnacle of gluttonous security, the ability to eat the same dish endlessly, pass- ing it through his system whole and miracu- lously wholesome, ready to be re-eaten again and again,” (42). 

I’m pretty sure that means he eats shit.

Strange Findings: Readers read the parts the like the slowest (18-9).

Our tastes are more likely to differentiate between groupings of books than actual works. (28)

Fill-in-the-blank tests (cloze tests) are bad. (32-3). Link your fifth-grade teacher to this post.

Bedtime reading has a physiological function. After getting excited by a book and then immediately putting it down and turning off the light, there is a “delightful” drop in “arousal, not only in skeletal muscle but also in skin potential, controlled by the autonomic nervous system,” (37-8).

Reading may be associated with salivation. (38)

How you read may be related to whether or not you can be hypnotized. (41) 

Well I hope you have enjoyed this first post and also that you are not salivating too much. The full article can be found here: http://www.jstor.org/stable/747903 Or download the file here: Ziddu.


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