Opinion: Let’s dive in… to our favorite books, the rise of reading and the selling of stories.
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Some people have summer bucket lists. They may want to: take a beach trip, relax at the pool or nosedive down a Slip ‘N Slide. Not me. Much like a middle schooler, I have a summer reading list. While some Ducks fly south for hotter temps and bluer waters, I lay sweating in my hammock with Jonathan Franzen blocking the sun from my eyes. (Books really have the perfect SPF.)
Sure, a vacation sounds fun and all, but let’s be real: I’d have both my nose and heart in a book the whole time. At risk of sounding super lame, let it be known I did dive into things besides fictional realities this summer. Still, nothing really topped the friends-that-totally-should-be-lovers, familial trauma and, of course, a Carolina marsh murder trial. Did your break have all that?
I’m not the only college student who is exercising their love for reading right now. For students, school breaks give more time and energy for the pursuit of leisurely reading. In fact, in an interesting turn of events, 18-29 year olds took the prize this year as the age group with the most book readers overall, according to a Statista survey. (Screen addiction my butt!) In an even stranger turn of events, the popular app TikTok may be in part behind this surging wave of young readers.
TikTok has become notorious for its wide array of virtual echo chambers, one of which is known as BookTok. #BookTok videos span over 68.1 billion views, withd thousands of videos shared. It has provided a popular online space for people to share book recommendations to specific audiences, and it’s working. I’ve seen friends who once believed themselves incapable of focused entertainment on something besides, well, TikTok, finish app favorites like “It Ends With Us” and “The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo”in a matter of days. The young adult genre alone has seen a 30.7% increase in print sales.
Some thanks in the reading resurgence is also owed to the COVID pandemic, as many quarantined individuals found themselves with an immense amount of alone time that only books could fill. Combined print and e-book sales reached their highest point in 2021 since publishing market gold standard NPD began tracking the data in 2004, with book sales on a 9% rise from the year before.
It appears that everyone’s jumping on the reading bandwagon now. Not me, of course. I’m different. I liked reading before it was cool. Good for the rest of you, I guess. (Kidding. Only a loon would think to gatekeep books. Who do I look like, Bradbury?) Something I really did like before it was cool was “Twilight.” Not that Stephanie Meyer’s supremely epic saga was ever not cool, but I didn’t see the rest of you “Twi-hards” out at La Push in your #TeamEdward t-shirt way back when.
Besides gatekeeping, my favorite part about finishing a book has got to be talking about it. A finished book can be recommended with a raving review or picked apart psychologically in online forums. It can be lent out to a friend, sparking anything from intense debate to an obsessive gushing. A finished book is never really finished. Stories are meant to be shared in this way, giving people space to exist together in a world of pages.
For some, finishing a book may even mean enjoying the accompanying movies. Unfortunately, fans of the book series don’t always end up fans of the screen-adaptations that follow. 2022 has already brought on film and show versions of literary favorites like Delia Owen’s “Where the Crawdads Sing,” Sally Rooney’s “Conversations with Friends,” the first season of Jenny Han’s “The Summer I Turned Pretty” trilogy and more. While I haven’t yet finished Han’s series, I can speak on the aforementioned adaptations — both of which I found commercialized and lacking authenticity to cater to consumer interest.
Without spoilers, I can say the “Where the Crawdads Sing” movie actually begins at the book’s climax, and instead takes viewers back in time for a choppy and toothless run-up of how we got there. Owens on the other hand is unafraid to make you read 100 pages of lengthy bird description before something not entirely depressing happens, reeling you in with the promise of murder. (I guess both had their flaws.) I can attribute no such fault to Rooney, one of my current favorite authors who is a master of dialogue and emotional angst. The Hulu series that followed her “Conversations with Friends” novel was missing both, as if the classically romantic black and white Rooney paints in had been reduced to a dull Dublin gray.
Trust that I’m qualified (original fan here) to say that these missteps were not apparent in “Twilight,” where most of the changes that were made for cinematic appeal, well, appealed. Scenes like Bella telling Edward she knows he’s a vampire and the twist-movie-ending that I will absolutely not spoil were what made the movies what they were: super tacky, overly dramatic and completely freaking awesome. (Seriously, though, if you haven’t watched themyet, what are you even doing?)
Hopefully the answer is reading. With just over a month of summer left for University of Oregon students, now is the perfect time to start the book you’ve been wanting to read (or at least its screen-adaptation). If you’re looking for inspiration beyond your #BookTok recommendations, here are some popular suggestions for college-age readers. If none of these sound appealing, find some time in your class-less schedule to visit a bookstore or library. Your thoughts and time are worth sharing with a story. Then being able to share that story again and again with others? It’s warm. Freeing. Magical. It’s what summer’s all about.
