ABSTRACT
This paper discusses issues related to assiduous readers in rural areas and their practices of reading, mainly regarding the meaning they attribute to reading, based on the concept of appropriation developed by Roger Chartier.This approach results from a previous research which investigated the progress of six rural readers whose daily reading is not connected to their occupations. The theoretical support based on the sociologist Bernard Lahire gives significant contribution since it proposes an analysis of the individual scale, in which the social aspect is addressed individually. The investigation of these readers' progress enabled not only the relation they establish between the rural area and reading to be perceived but also an image of reading practices in the social world to be outlined. In the texts they read, the most common themes show there is an approximation to the schemes of the actors' own experience, a fact that reveals ethical-practical appropriation of reading.
KEYWORDS
history of reading; reading sociology; reading practices; rural readers