My guilty reading secret is revealed when people visit our home and see the floor to ceiling bookshelves in our hall. "Wow," they say, "You can't have read all these books, can you!?" I just shrug and say "Well, most of them." I daren't tell them that those on display reflect a small fraction of the books I have actually read, or that there are boxes and boxes in the attic that I don't have room for on the shelves.
It seems to me that *most* people just don't read (my brother has only ever read one book in his life), and they are slightly contemptuous of those that do. It's a wonderful thing to find another reader - the person I get on best with at work is someone I found out latterly is an avid reader with similar reading tastes to my own.
So to answer Dr. Drib's OP, I have been the subject of inverted snobbery I think, where the fact that I read is seen as slightly peculiar. Even from my own team at work - I posed the question at a recent Christmas lunch "what do you all enjoy doing most?" and I was the only one who said reading. They were all incredulous that I had read over 100 books the previous year, almost like there was something to be ashamed of in so doing.
|