Reading Gave Me a Community
If you ask me what the best hobby in the world is, my answer would be reading. Would I be biased? Maybe a little bit. But falling in love with books has done more than entertain me. It has also given me a community like no other.
You see, I’ve always possessed a larger-than-life imagination. And before I started reading more regularly, I tried to feed my imagination with movies and music. These were amazing, of course, but there remained this unfilled hole in me that wanted to sail across oceans, ride horses across wildernesses, and touch the stars. I wanted to solve murder mysteries, fall in love, and experience defining moments in history.
I started reading everything: regency novels like Bridgerton, historical Western novels like Gone With The Wind, Scottish historical novels, epic fantasy, historical fantasy like The City of Brass, cozy mysteries, historical fiction like The Things We Cannot Say, women’s fiction like Yinka, Where is Your Huzband?, book club fiction like Daisy Jones and the Six, dystopian like The Hunger Games, thrillers, Christian fiction like One Tuesday Morning, and many more.
Reading played an important role in my life- allowing me to explore new worlds, be entertained, and stretch my imagination. My days felt more full, and I knew I always had a great book to dive into at the end of the day. But then it only got better.
From researching to find my next read, I found two major online communities for readers. Goodreads and Bookstagram.
Goodreads is an online library/bookshelf where millions of people rate and review books, find readers with similar book interests, and connect. The platform offers book suggestions based on the genres you enjoy or what other readers with similar tastes have loved. The site also holds giveaways and notifies readers when their anticipated book has been released.
‘Bookstagram’ is a creative corner of Instagram dedicated to all things reading There, you will find hundreds of readers who post aesthetic photos of books and talk about their favorite reads.
There are other communities for readers such as BookTwitter and BookTok, but using Goodreads and Bookstagram has come more naturally to me. Through both of these platforms, I’ve connected with dozens of people who share similar interests and support me generally. This was life-changing for me since there aren’t a lot of readers where I come from, hence it could feel a bit isolating. With these communities, I’ve made friends who make me feel like I belong.
We chat all day about the subjects I love the most: books, our favorite ones, how we feel about recent releases, book covers and titles, libraries around the world, our best quotes, beloved characters, and so on.
For some of us, going to libraries or attending book fairs to physically connect with book lovers is a dream, but just not accessible yet. These online reading communities help us make meaningful connections and feel like a part of the exciting world of stories, even when we are an ocean away. Reading itself has been a huge gift in my life, but there has been this added benefit of building a global community with like-minded people that was totally unexpected.
