Motoko Rich has a piece in the New York Times lamenting the perceived loss of Me Time when it comes to reading, "Reading might well have been among the last remaining private activities, but it is now a relentlessly social pursuit." She even cites Virgina Woolf to lend some attempted historical credence to that claim. The problem is that Rich didn't go quite far enough back. For nearly all of the history of the printed word, reading has been a profoundly social activity. As David Hall wrote in "Cultures of Print":

A history of reading must take account of variations in ability, and of changes in the basic mode of reading over time. The pace could differ, as could the setting in which reading occurred over time. We read privately and to ourselves, and often own a piece of furniture designed for book storage. These conditions were uncommon before the nineteenth century. (Emphasis added)

The verb "to publish" historically meant "to read aloud in public." At home, reading the same (often religious) text aloud to the entire family was the norm, not reading "at home at night by myself with one lamp." As McLuhan notes, "the medieval monks' reading carrell was indeed a singing booth." Ancient manuscripts lacked any punctuation at all, forcing the reader to sound out the words, and the separation of sight and sound in reading is a very modern phenomenon:

In fact, it is only today that the decree nisi has been handed down by the speed-reading institutes to divorce eye and speech in the act of reading. The recognition that in reading from left to right we make incipient word formations with our throat muscles was discovered to be the principal cause of "slow" reading. But the hushing up of the reader has been a gradual process, and even the printed word did not succeed in silencing all readers. But we have tended to associate lip movements and mutterings from a reader with semi-literacy, a fact which has contributed to the American stress on a merely visual approach to reading in elementary reading.

Books (and reading) have not always looked the way they have in our lifetimes, and it's important to acknowledge the assumptions we make based on our current experience do not preclude different norms and habits in the past -- or the future.