The Eclectic Reader

Eclecticism has been among the most central concerns in the sociology of cultural consumption for 30 years, but hardly any research has been done on the eclecticism of readers. We have been using data from Goodreads to address this blind spot. Our research enables us to describe some general patterns of breadth vs narrowness in the reading habits of highly active Goodreads users, which largely resemble the socially hierarchized schema of omnivore vs univore discerned by scholars in other fields of cultural practice. But our analysis also highlights the limitations of our model, and indeed of eclecticism itself, a concept rife with problems that have have often gone unremarked in the sociological literature. These problems involve the relationship of eclecticism to temporality; the slippages between preference (taste) and practice (habit); and the sheer variety of equally legitimate but incommensurate ways to classify works of literature and culture.