This past year has given readers more time to read and to keep adding books to their TBR pile haha, but what of the other people who always wanted to open books but didn't have enough time to do it?
Photo by: QuartzIndia
If in the last year you have been living under a rock, we are experiencing a Pandemic… COVID-19 made us do a full stop to our daily and normal lives, made us stayed in our houses, needing less time to commute from place to place and having more time to do things that we couldn't do before because we were "too busy" or because we didn't have enough time.
“We read to know we are not alone.”
–C.S. Lewis
Some context and statistics
According to the Indian Book Consumer, reading time in adults from 2019 to 2020 has increased from 9 to 16 hours a week. If you ask me that's a lot of reading time, and I'm certainly glad more people have joined the world of literature. In Amazon, YA fiction revenue increased by 21% in 2020, while nonfiction revenue grew by 38%. This was due in large part since events and general physical contact was almost non-existent. People needed an escape from the reality we were (and still are) dealing with. This totally applies to me (who doesn't want to escape reality for a little while?), but also I finished my studies and the work I have to do is now reduced to a few hours, which has given me more free time.
The Universitat de València and the University of Salamanca made a study from April to July of 2020, where they are evaluating how COVID-19 confinement has impacted our reading habits. They are doing it with a questionnaire, where people have to answer certain questions about their habits during their confinement and also about their reading experience during this time.
In the end, about 4,000 Spanish people participated in the study. Before the pandemic, these people read an average of 4 hours and a half, and this increased to almost 6 hours in the first weeks of the lockdown and women were the ones who increased their reading time the most.
Indian author Pavan K. Varma said, "long weeks of solitude and isolation, turned people’s mind towards the basic truths of life; what matters, what does not and how to acquire such meaningful knowledge that can help us grapple with life when it is so opaque and volatile".
Literature in Times of Change
Living during a stressful time (e.g. living a global pandemic), people tend to seek comfort in certain books and some genres might shift as a response to these periods of change. These changes help us understand why during specific periods, where there is a clear social, political, and/or environmental disruption, literary genres change and take certain nuances. This could be seen during the French revolution when Gothic literature was a response from the British Protestants. Some example books are A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, Our Lady of the Potatoes by Duncan Sprott and Caleb William by William Godwin.
Several people have found the confinement to be an excellent chance to read books they wouldn't ordinarily have the time or interest to read (such as dull classics –I'm sorry, I have a love/hate relationship with classic books–) or to cover other gaps that are stirring up our society, like the protests over police brutality and racism (this has been a huge catalyst for many readers to seek out more books and information by non-white authors). These books about racism are in my TBR but I'll happily share them with you: So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo and The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas. Another controversy that was (and continues to be) important this year was the topic of violence against women and people from the LGBTQ+ community. Some books that talked about these issues are:
I am a Girl from Africa by Elizabeth Nyamayaro
Circe by Madeline Miller. This book is definitely in my top 10 books; although it doesn't talk about feminism per se Circe might be the first feminist goddess in the Greek Pantheon.
The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller. This books left me heartbroken, so you should keep a box of tissues nearby if you read it.
Red, White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston.
Sometimes, changing phases leave lifelong imprints, and as readers, we want to know where we stand on topics in a society where more and more ideas are debated, frequently polemic, and where diverse opinions thrive. But one thing is for sure, both authors and readers are constantly on the lookout for new knowledge and new books to either fill their bookshelves or to escape reality (but why not both?).
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