The Committed Reader: Reading for Utility, Pleasure, and Fulfillment in the Twenty-First Century

Stebbins has produced a scholarly work which is well defined.

The Committed Reader adopts a positive sociological approach to reading and proposes a complex typology of reading as an activity that can be utilitarian, pleasurable or fulfilling. Readers familiar with Robert Stebbins’s work will not be surprised to find the book is theoretically grounded in the serious leisure perspective and seeks to develop a framework within which committed reading canm be explained through constructs of serious leisure. . . . The author’s positive sociological approach is reflected in its intended contribution to library and information science as a way of quantifying ‘information’s place in leisure’, that is, reading undertaken in pursuit of life-enhancing leisure activity. … To members of the leisure studies community, The Committed Reader offers a positive sociological framework for investigations of reading for leisure. This framework is complex, broad and amorphous.

This book is of interest to those wanting a philosophical approach to the act of reading, but there is little practical information for the layperson, librarian, or information professional seeking inspiration and ideas for encouraging reading by others.