With 2025 now well and truly underway, if reading this year was a late-night resolution idea, you’re either doing really well at your newfound habit…or it was discarded within the first week! But intriguingly, with more people turning away from their phones and delving instead into the world of literature, maybe more people have kept their resolutions than we may think! Why is this? Well, open your phone, and you might get a sense of why.
The world around us has always been unpredictable and turbulent. Diplomatic and humanitarian crises, war and famine, an ever-darkening climate, and the latest entertainment scandals are all taking hold of the news cycles. Whilst this may have always been the case, the immediacy and borderless nature of social media, 24-hour news coverage and instant messaging means we can never truly tune out of it all. And it’s not just phones! Who else has spent an hour searching through Netflix only to land on a film they’ve already seen hundreds of times?
The world is a fairly scary place, particularly right now, so I see no surprise that more and more people are trading even a small amount of their time for a classic book. With millions to choose from, you select the world you want to be immersed in, an escape for better or for worse. For those brief moments of delving into the latest novel or revisiting a classic, you transform your world into exactly what you want (and perhaps, need) it to be – a form of control we don’t always have anymore.
I have always been a bookworm, but seeing more people embrace a Kindle or audiobook, or my personal favourite, a classic hardback, is a welcome sight! One that enriches lives and conversations to discussing an unexpected plot or new understandings of the world around us.
So, where do you start if I have convinced you to delve into books again? My best advice is to head to a charity shop, one with a plentiful book supply, and select a title or two that sounds interesting, and go from there! Or if you want something a little more particular, look online for second-hand options! My favourite book of all time, Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, was found through a friend of mine reading it, and when I first finished it, I was blown away by the mystery, the intrigue, and the clever way Christie tied the plot together.
How you get into reading is up to you, and with the intense reading pressures of university, I can understand some scepticism. But from one bookworm to a future one, closing the browser page and turning the physical one is a great place to start, to make your world infinitely bigger…
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