Reading Outdoors

Abstract

Chapter 5 explores the tension between reading indoors during lockdown and readers wanting to get outside. While many works published during the early days of the pandemic showed a nature disturbed and disrupted, our readers, we find, turned to older renditions of nature as a source of comfort. These fictions had a direct impact on what people did, motivating them to walk or visit rural landscapes they had read about, or to spend time in their gardens. The connection between being outside and reading a book about nature suggests just one of the more intricate relationships between language and action that readers have negotiated in the space and time of the pandemic. While some read to travel, others travelled and read at the same time, or followed up their fiction reading with real travel, but in all cases, books appear here as coordinates to our lives as well as our communities.

Organization and the arts: Critical conversations on expanding meanings and understandings of who matters

“…While this study focused on intellectual writers in workplaces, another avenue here worth noting is that what people read outside workplaces matters for their work lives, and vice versa. Ethnographies in this respect, such as a recent one of novel readers in the UK and Denmark during the pandemic (Davies et al, 2022), can be a means of discovering this particular intersection between work lives and literary arts through what may be called workplace literary sociology.…”