I have just finished my library run for the holidays and as you can see my stack of material to read is pretty formidable. I have done a quick count and found I have a little over 5,000 pages of academic text to read in less than a month (not counting any of the papers I have downloaded that I may want to read).

Somewhere before mid-January I will also have to produce 10 to 15 pages on how Bourdieu’s ideas of symbolic capital – particularly notions of field and habitus – relate to the production of personal home pages and weblogs, mark six essays and prepare to teach an undergrad course at the London College of Printing.

Of course, I am somewhat exaggerating the travails of this holiday season – I have already dipped into several of the books and some of the others I signed out on the off chance they might be useful and will probably not get around to reading. Above all, several of the books are collections of essentially separate chapters, so I won’t need to read them all (and anyway I like reading – if I didn’t, would I do a “PhD”:http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/study/mPhilPhDMediaAndCommunications.htm?)

FWIW the books I have taken home to read are hidden below:


Abercrombie, N. and B. Longhurst (1998) Audiences : A Sociological Theory of Performance and Imagination, Sage, London ; Thousand Oaks, Calif.

Butsch, R. (2000) The Making of American Audiences : From Stage to Television, 1750-1990,

Calhoun, C., E. LiPuma and M. Postone (1993) Bourdieu : Critical Perspectives, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Ill.

Certeau, M. d. (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life, University of California Press, Berkeley.

Fowler, B. (1997) Pierre Bourdieu and Cultural Theory : Critical Investigations, Sage, London ; Thousand Oaks, Calif.

Fowler, B. (2000) Reading Bourdieu on Society and Culture, Blackwell, Oxford

Frow, J. (1995) Cultural Studies and Cultural Value, Oxford University Press, Oxford ; New York.

Harris, C. and A. Alexander (1998) Theorizing Fandom : Fans, Subculture and Identity, Hampton Press, Cresskill, N.J.

Hoyles, M. (1977) The Politics of Literacy, Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative, London.

Jenkins, R. (2002) Pierre Bourdieu, (Rev. ed) Routledge, London.

Lahire, B. (1999) Champ, Hors-Champ, Contre-Champ, La Découverte, Paris.

Lovink, G. (2002) Dark Fiber : Tracking Critical Internet Culture, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.

Meyrowitz, J. (1985) No Sense of Place : The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Oxford University Press, Oxford ; New York.

Sennett, R. (1990) The Conscience of the Eye : The Design and Social Life of Cities, Knopf, New York.

Sokal, A. D. and J. Bricmont Intellectual Impostures, Profile, London.

Willis, P. (1990) Common Culture : Symbolic Work at Play in the Everyday Cultures of the Young, Open University Press, Buckingham.