Readers Interviews

Blog 2
          I can't figure out how to upload my readers interviews to Blogger. I've been having a hard time figuring out how this website actually works. But I still wanted to make a blog about the reader interviews because it was such an interesting experiment. I interviewed mostly my roommates and a couple of friends from different colleges. It was interesting getting the responses. As an English major and book lover, I love to read and probably read more than the average college student because I read for pleasure and not just for classes. What I found out was that most of the people I interviewed that liked reading for pleasure, enjoyed reading easy things. It was mostly girls that I interviewed, so there was a lot of romance novels and authors like Nicolas Sparks and Fifty Shades of Grey. So in that respect its a lot like television. Something that provides a relaxing experience or an escape for the readers. Not something that your mind has to really work at to understand. This makes sense when you take their other answers into consideration. College students read A LOT for their classes. Most of the answers I got when asked how long they read a day for classes was anywhere between 3-5 hours. Considering that on average, kids are in classes about 5 hours a day thats a lot. That did not include the other forms of studying or work that they had to do on top of the reading. That accounted for another 2-4 hours of their time. More for midterms and finals. So it seems logical that by the time students are done studying, they are burnt out on reading or thinking about hard things. If they are going to read they are going to read something that is fun for them, or if they don't want to read at all. A lot of answers I got when I asked what they did for their free time, was that students really enjoy Netflix or hanging out with friends. I definitely get that. I love watching Netflix to hang out. Netflix is a great way to get out of your head for a little while. Really the overwhelming response I got was that students enjoy reading (or rather they want to) but they don't have time or are too burnt out on school to want to read anything at the end of the day. The only response that I got that was extremely against reading was from one of my roommates. She hates it. She says she is not good at it, so doesn't like it and she has no interest in it. She thought the definition of literary was literally. Another interesting finding was that everyone I talked to hated poetry. Like really hated it. Which I found interesting because poetry is one of my favorite parts of my major. I love taking poetry classes. So overall this exercise was very interesting and enlightening to me. I am excited to do the author interviews because I think that will give me even more insight into the way people view reading for pleasure. I am especially excited to get an authors point of view because writing for myself has always been something I have loved to do. I don't ever actually plan on becoming a published author, but I think it will be very interesting to talk to one and get his thoughts about his work.