Quote:
Originally Posted by Dr. Drib
Here's a question I pose:
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 think it's too easy to stereotype by location.
I grew up in a town of about 50,000 in a state that is not particularly wealthy. However, my father was a professor. Most of my friends' parents were professors, and those that weren't tended to have graduate degrees. This meant that every house I went to was filled with books, and almost everyone I knew read. When I was 15, we all decided to read Jane Austen because one of my friend's mothers had written her MA thesis on her. NPR was pretty much all you heard on the radio, and PBS was mostly what we watched. That was my high school experience, and it was defined by the people I associated with.
However, there were only about 600 professors in the town, and of course a huge percentage of the population had a very different teenage experience than I did. But the difference does not depend on the location in particular as much as it did on my social group.
Now, obviously, if you don't live in a college town you won't encounter a lot of professors. And if you live in a town of 10,000 in the middle of farm country and work at a tractor dealership, you are probably less likely to encounter people who read than if you live a town of 2 million and work at a college. But even a poor farm state is going to have places where a lot of people read, and there are plenty of rural areas in, say Ohio, where readers will be few and far between, even if they are very common in, say, Cincinnati.