What We Read and Why

I have just been looking at a very interesting blog about our reading habits. Well, I guess it was more a transcript of the author's reading habits than an analysis - such a shame, promised the objective world and given a subjective dissection.
I think our reading habits are simple to analyse really. This blog said 'we read to relate' and that really sums it up for me. Ever had the experience of starting a book and having to give up on it for its inaccessibility, only to find in a year's time to pick it up and relish it like a gormet meal? Our reading habits almost always relate to what is going on in our life at the time; when my life is rosy and stress free I can read heavy non fiction on the great poets and their lives, but when I'm bogged under and exhausted all the time, a trashy novel is all I can manage. So the level we read at could be an indicator of the levels of complexity our life course is experiencing.
Some people don't read anything heavy. Does this mean that they are under mountains of stress all the time? Things are never as simple as that. Our reading habits are not just connected to the activities in our life, in order to get a full understanding of why we read the way we do you would need to look at the whole person: their upbringing, needs, wants, education, lifestyle and whole host of other aspects. Really the only person who can analyse your reading habits is yourself; you would need to know the truth about far more than most people are willing to tell and some things that people don't even know about themselves.
So we can't analyse the reading habits of any person but the one we know the most about. How is this useful? The understanding of your own reading habits may be able to tell you things about yourself that you had no idea about. For example, you may find that reading a lot of crime or mystery novels satisfies your need to have all the answers to everything. Or role play games give you the power to be in control all the time. Usually you can see the traits attributed to a genre without a great deal of difficulty. This may sound like a generalisation and of course your analysis can be wrong, but quite often, even if you think it is wrong in some way it's just something you didn't know about yourself.
It is not impossible to second guess a person's reading habits with a small amount of information; this also works the other way around. By looking at a person's book as you sit opposite them on the train you can have a lot of fun creating the person behind that book. The better you get at understanding various genres and what they tell us, the easier you will find the analysis. It is even possible - for the hardened analyst - to differentiate between various authors or styles within a genre; if a certain novelist does not allow all the crimes to be solved in their murder mystery, where is the satisfaction in reading the story? The must be another motive.
I am fascinated by my own reading habits at the moment, beginning to understand that I still have a lot to prove to the word through my reading habits - high brow literature and heavy duty non fiction. Being aware of this doesn't make me want to change my habits, but it does make me read the books in a different way; I can enjoy them now without having to worry about what I'm not reading, what I should have read or why I am not a genius yet. Well I think that's where I'd like to be...I understand it, I've just got to get my head around it!