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• cara gittings
• Napier
• New Zealand

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Do you think reading books is bourgeois?

I have had a debate lately about the act of reading where i was told reading books was started by bourgeois women who had not a lot else to do whilst waiting around in manors etc spanning through the 17th century onwards, suggesting it was a lazy pastime not a great source of awareness. i suggested that without reading, books, and documentation we would be completely inept throughout all courses of history, in fact, we would have been completely deprived of knowledge. Can you imagine if Shakespeare, Keats, Homer and indeed the Bible were not blue prints of our literary beings? You can see my slant but I was interested to see if anyone has a different perspective on this.