Desirable reading: the relationship between women students' lives and their reading practices

This study reports research into women students’ reading habits and practices. The research
demonstrates the interconnections between participants’attitudes toward reading and their personal
and family relationships. It also reveals how they use their reading to explore issues that
concern them as members of families and cultural groups and suggests that reading is a matter of
desire, aspiration, and identity formation. This study argues that detailed qualitative research
about reading identities could assist in understanding how mature students approach reading
literary and other texts as part of their programs of study.