This wide-ranging, comparative, and multidisciplinary collection addresses the significance of books in creating the idea of home. The chapters present cases that reveal the affective and sensory dimensions of books and reading in the practice of everyday life of individuals, in communities, and in society. The complex relationship of books, reading, and home is explored through American and European case studies both in bourgeois and middle-class homes, and in working-class and immigrant families and communities with limited possibilities for reading. The volume combines the conceptions and representations of domesticity, the materiality of reading, and library as a place, drawing on book history and material culture studies as well as anthropology and sociology of the home.

Brings together current research on adult book reading to children; chapter authors are eminent scholars from fields of reading and literacy, child language, speech pathology, and psychology, representing diverse perspectives.

This summer, during these strange strange times, immerse yourself in words that have touched all of us and will always get to the core of all of us, of every single person. Books that have made us think, change, relate, cry and laugh:_x000D_ Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Robert Louis Stevenson)_x000D_ A Doll's House (Henrik Ibsen)_x000D_ A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens)_x000D_ Dubliners (James Joyce)_x000D_ A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (James Joyce)_x000D_ War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy)_x000D_ Howards End (E. M. Forster)_x000D_ Le Père Goriot (Honoré de Balzac)_x000D_ Sense and Sensibility (Jane Austen)_x000D_ Anne of Green Gables Series (L. M. Montgomery)_x000D_ The Wind in the Willows (Kenneth Grahame)_x000D_ Gitanjali (Rabindranath Tagore)_x000D_ Diary of a Nobody (Grossmith)_x000D_ The Beautiful and Damned (F. Scott Fitzgerald)_x000D_ Moll Flanders (Daniel Defoe)_x000D_ 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (Jules Verne)_x000D_ Gulliver's Travels (Jonathan Swift)_x000D_ The Last of the Mohicans (James Fenimore Cooper)_x000D_ Peter and Wendy (J. M. Barrie)_x000D_ The Three Musketeers (Alexandre Dumas)_x000D_ Iliad & Odyssey (Homer)_x000D_ Kama Sutra_x000D_ Dona Perfecta (Benito Pérez Galdós)_x000D_ The Divine Comedy (Dante)_x000D_ The Rise of Silas Lapham (William Dean Howells)_x000D_ The Book of Tea (Kakuzo Okakura)_x000D_ Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert)_x000D_ The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Victor Hugo)_x000D_ Red and the Black (Stendhal)_x000D_ Rob Roy (Walter Scott)_x000D_ Barchester Towers (Anthony Trollope)_x000D_ Uncle Tom's Cabin (Harriet Beecher Stowe)_x000D_ Three Men in a Boat (Jerome K. Jerome)_x000D_ Tristram Shandy (Laurence Sterne)_x000D_ Tess of the d'Urbervilles (Thomas Hardy)_x000D_ My Antonia (Willa Cather)_x000D_ The Age of Innocence (Edith Wharton)_x000D_ The Awakening (Kate Chopin)_x000D_ Babbitt (Sinclair Lewis)_x000D_ The Four Just Men (Edgar Wallace)_x000D_ Of Human Bondage (W. Somerset Maugham)_x000D_ The Portrait of a Lady (Henry Jame...