Quote:
Originally Posted by Dr. Drib
Does location play a part in reading snobbery?
My answer is 'Yes,' at least in my experience.
Perhaps your experience verifies this, as well? Or perhaps not for you?
Don
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I lived for many years in the Tokyo area. Nearly everyone there commutes by public transport, and until the advent of mobile phones, nearly everyone read on the train. Newspapers, the racing form, tabloids, paperbacks, English books, textbooks, magazines, manga, even dictionaries. Your fellow straphangers would shove their reading choices in your face. Literally. Japanese commuter trains are too crowded for snobbery.
When i was there, Japan didn't have so much of the cultural Narodism one finds in the US (and which underlies the reverse snobbism i brough up upthread). On the other hand, since a book was to some degree just a book, there was also less to be gained from posing with
Finnegan's wake at the local kissaten (cafe).
I've also lived in Montreal, where there's a sharper sense of class, cultural & linguistic divisions. I did have a sense that reading or one's choice in reading material might be read as a marker of one divide or another. It may have, but that sort of interpretation of my choice in reading was never brought to my attention.
The upstate NY town where i lived for a few years was an academic fishbowl. People noticed everything. "I saw X reading Y at Z yesterday. Pah! Such trash!"