The Cultural Sociology of Reading: The Meanings of Reading and Books Across the World
This book showcases recent work about reading and books in sociology and the humanities across the globe. From different standpoints and within the broad perspectives within the cultural sociology of reading, the eighteen chapters examine a range of reading practices, genres, types of texts, and reading spaces.
Borrowed Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein from the library. This copy has a big misprint - about 50 pages are randomly repeated in place of 50 that should be there.
At first I thought wow, these #BookerPrize books really are getting impenetrable 😂 but fortunately I got my hands on a complete copy
@Ellenfelicity@bookstodon the printer may have gotten a signature swapped. Let the library know, so they can pull that copy from circulation. It's rare but it happens sometimes
This is a series that has come up repeatedly when I read any kind of fantasy recommendation list, and been recommended to me personally by a few folks. Should probably have read this sooner, but no time like the present!
Hope it lives up to the dark Harry Potter vibes it gives off!
I am reading Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution
Paul Kay and Brent Berlin (1969). Their observation is that when a language has a limited number of color words, which colors are given priority is a fairly universal order of operations beginning with black and white, moving on to red and spreading out from there.
They have samples of words from dozens of languages and still manage to be biased by their western colonizer heritage. In the introduction where they explain their method they first equate number of basic color words with how evolved a given culture's society is. They later make a similar statement but replace society with level of industrialization.
Further more they exclude "borrowed" words from languages if those languages happen to be ones spoken by a colonized person. There is no similar discussion of borrowed words showing up in a colonizer language (English or Spanish for example).
@ohyran@bookstodon The metric seems to be: if European language and if short word, then basic color word. I will be posting more thoughts on this book as I read it. I ran out of characters in my first post. #color
@bookstodon On page 35 in the discussion of "Stage VII" languages, the authors state that Catalan has no word for orange. Given that oranges come from that region of the world and keeping in mind that "orange" is a borrowed word from Spanish "naranja" I called bullshit. The word is "taronja."
And that brings me to second complaint of this study. The reporting language experts aren't native speakers. Nor are they artists. They are primarily anthropologists from colonizing nations.
I guess you could say it's a hobby, I like reading novels about children of divinity / siblings (or friends) of Jesus. At least the ones I've read have all been humorous.
It's been ages since I read this, but I remember being impressed that while it is comic and entertaining and silly, it's also really grounded in the source material.
Just finished The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet (which I really enjoyed) and have now read twice the amount of books I set out to read in 2023! It’s been a good year for reading 📚 #Books#Reading#Bookstodon
Randomly thinking about Elzabeth Hoyt, whose website is gone, and who hasn't been around online for three or so years; and about Lisa Kleypas, who hasn't updated her website since before the release of Devil in Disguise two years ago (in fact, her FAQ was updated while she was still writing Chasing Cassandra, which came out in 2020, so it's been at least a full year longer than that).