Charts and figures were used to present the results of the findings. The data gathered were analyzed quantitatively with the use of Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS). A survey questionnaire was used for the gathering of data. The study was conducted at Central Mindanao University situated in Maramag, Bukidnon, Philippines. In this poem, Larkin maintains the rather bluff persona throughout.This study aims to identify the reading habits of the students and site their reading preferences that can help them to improve their performance in different courses.
But these are all later poems, and ‘A Study of Reading Habits’ written a number of years before them. Many of his poems begin with a rather crass statement – see ‘ This Be The Verse’, ‘ High Windows’, ‘ Sad Steps’, and ‘ Vers de Société’ – but then move towards something more all-encompassing, subtle, and, for want of a better word, poetic. What is curious about this final line is that it’s a departure from the technique seen in many of Philip Larkin’s poems. (Larkin, we should remember, was a librarian: of course, he doesn’t mean to imply here that all books are crap, only the sort of escapist novels he, or his speaker, used to find solace in.) The bluntness of the advice to ‘Get stewed’ brings us down to earth with a bump, as does the coarseness of the final line. But the reader has come to recognise all of the tropes found in Westerns as generic and formulaic. Westerns are often associated with providing a version of masculinity rooted in notions of heroism and derring-do: the cowboy always gets the girl. The final stanza focuses on the Western genre of novel, as the words ‘dude’, ‘yellow’, and ‘store’ (not ‘shop’), all reveal. Similarly, the rhymes in the second stanza – specs with sex, fangs with meringues – are comical and surprising, and the grammatical inaccuracy of ‘Me and my cloak and fangs’ (not ‘My cloak and fangs and I’, or, less awkwardly, ‘I, with my cloak and fangs’) suggests a naivety on the part of the speaker’s teenage expectations, both of sex and of his reading. The phrase ‘dirty dogs’ in the first stanza sounds as though it’s come straight out of one of the school stories or adventure tales the boy-reader devoured: like Pip in Dickens’s Great Expectations, Larkin’s speaker is looking back at his boyhood reading from the vantage-point of adulthood, and there is something archly ironic and knowing about this opening stanza. Such a paraphrase misses Larkin’s wit, of course, and the self-conscious way in which he writes about not only his (or his speaker’s) past attitude to reading, and his older, jaded attitude too.
The speaker of the poem ends with the advice that it’s better to spend your time getting drunk: that’s a more efficient way for the disillusioned reader to escape the disappointing realities of the world. They all have the same plots and the same characters, and have become stale and unpredictable. Finally, though, Larkin’s speaker concludes that, in middle age, reading has lost its appeal because the novels which provide such vicarious satisfaction are now all too familiar, and so their escapist visions fail to convince. In summary, Larkin’s speaker tells us that reading books used to provide escapism for him: first at school, where reading provided consolation from bullies by letting him live out his fantasies of vanquishing the school bully then, as a young man, reading provided an outlet for living out all of his sexual fantasies, and he could imagine being the dashing heroes of the novels he read, who ‘clubbed’ women with sex.
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