Open Cultural Studies 2018; 2: 591-597 Jiří Trávníček* Reading and Our Life Stories https://doi.org/10.1515/culture-2018-0054 Received April 20, 2018; accepted November 29, 2018 Abstract: This article addresses the topic of reading in the course of life. Its point of departure is the oral-history research carried out between 2009 and 2015 among 138 narrators (informants, respondents, interviewees) across the Czech Republic. The author presents its background, parameters as well as one of its general achievements—four moments of initiations on an axis of our reading life. The first of these takes the form of sociability (being accepted); the second—autonomy (mastering the skill); the third— maturity (being independent), the fourth—reflection (mirroring). What follows from this is the finding that reading undergoes continual development, whether a long continuity or a meandering chain of partial discontinuities. Thus, our oral history-based research shows that being open to the lifetime span provides us with a specific sensitivity towards reading, stressing mainly the fact of its being rooted in particular time- conditioned, life-motivated and purposive situations. Keywords: reading, time aspects, life stories, initiations The study deals with an oral history project that has yielded (i) many findings of a very personal nature (each life story is a world of its own), spanning the years from the 1930s to 2015, (ii) findings of more than an individual nature, i.e. shared (generation experiences, key phenomena of the Czech reading culture) and also (iii) those which might be called general. In this paper, I am focusing on both the whole project (its design) and on what might seem to be its general achievement—the reading life story as a series of four initiations. Before doing so, two general issues should be taken into account, namely reading in its social nature and temporality, mainly in terms of its lifetime structure. The oral history project represents a second line of the long-term research called “Reading and Readers in the Czech Republic.” Before our oral history-based project we carried out three extensive statistical representative readership surveys (2007, 2010, 2013), organised by the National Library of the Czech Republic and the Institute of Czech Literature—Czech Academy of Sciences (see Trávníček). Although these data are inclusive and macroscopic, they provide a reliable and useful picture of the whole Czech reading population with all its main socio-demographic traits. In other words, the macroscopic survey data were used as background knowledge enabling us to know where the highs and lows of the Czech reading population are, how this population is structured as a whole (compared to other countries), where barriers lay between readers and non-readers, who the leaders of the reading culture are. These data gave us a clear picture of how reading develops within the life cycle. Reading Reading (as a basic literacy skill, cultural power and habitus) consists of manifold tasks and fulfils various purposes (see Alexander 260-263; Briggs and Burke 50-54; Johnson 3-16; Lesen in Deutschland 2008 52-56; Lesňák 85-86; Mangen and van der Weel 116-118; Mann and Burgoyne 68; Rosenthal xiv-xv; Seidenberg 12-13; Sheldrick Ross et al. 5; Siekierski 16-17). Its field is socially broad and culturally multifaceted and can Research Article Open Access. © 2018 Jiří Trávníček, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 License. *Corresponding author: Jiří Trávníček, Institute of Czech Literature, Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague/Brno, the Czech Republic, E-mail: travnicek@ucl.cas.cz.