Remember the good ole days when reading was cool? Let me set the scene a little bit… we were 12 years old, and Twilight and Harry Potter were all the rage. At such a young age, we took on the task of reading 500-page books. We fell in love with a werewolf and wanted to attend Hogwarts. Those were the good ole days. When the most challenging decision in our lives was #teamEdward or #teamJacob. Then, we became teenagers, and social media began to gain popularity, and we traded our books for our cell phones.
Reading then suddenly went out of style. The closest thing to reading we all got was reading tweets. We spent our days consumed over media. Whether that being social media or television, or movies. All of the popular books turned into movies. We could see Jacob Black’s attraction in The Twilight movies physically, and we never looked back. Our imagination started to dwindle because there was a visual version of all of the popular teen novels. The Harry Potter movies, The Twilight movies, even Divergent came out with a movie series. Teenagers no longer needed to read because they could get the same satisfaction in two hours, rather than taking two weeks to read a book.
This lack of reading continued for a while. Social media became more accessible to more age groups, and media began to engulf us even more than before.
Then… 2020 happened. Everything got shut down. You couldn’t go anywhere, Hollywood could not film content, Broadway got shut down, and you could not even go to the movie theaters. Eventually, there were no new movies or television shows to watch. We could not go anywhere, so Zoom became probably the most used application of the year. Our whole days became consumed by screens because we could no longer meet face to face. We worked on our computers so, a break from work was scrolling on your phone, when you got bored on your phone, your break was to watch TV then. It was an endless cycle of blue light and screens.
Then, Mrs. Reese Witherspoon came to save us all. Reese Witherspoon created a book club app in which she gives book recommendations, readers can comment on the books, and there are virtual book club sessions. People no longer had the excuse of not knowing what to read because there was a new book recommendation every month; the app also provided new social interaction that we have all been craving for so long.
Reese Witherspoon’s book club is very popular; it is not the only virtual book club. There are many other platforms that provide the same concepts, such as GoodReads. Through online book clubs such as these, readers can stimulate their brains and exercise their childhood imagination, which we have all lost. Readers can meet new people in a comfortable and safe way. Most importantly, we can take a break from screens and do something good for our brains.