ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on reading 'bedtime stories', with an emphasis on what heap calls reading 'simpliciter', the practices of mundane or lay reading, rather than reading 'cultura', the cultivated practices of professional reading, the reading of literature critics. It explores the use data gathered in domestic environments that concentrate upon the actual situated practices of one aspect of reading for pleasure reading stories to children at bedtime and adopt a position of ethnomethodological indifference. The chapter examines how reading is actually accomplished in these settings as a part of the daily fabric of life: how it fits within the literature critics. It considers some videotaped data about reading and the ways in which it constitutes socially organized phenomenon within the home. The chapter concludes by noting that these observations exist within the larger canvas of familial concerns and predicates. Children being read bedtime stories may pose questions about specific things within them.
