Once upon a time, not too long ago, there was a wizard, a vampire and a girl with a bow.
They existed in a time when, if you weren’t reading, you, arguably, weren’t cool. You weren’t part of the global phenomenon. You weren’t with the “in” crowd. And there were three crowds to choose from.
- Tributes
- Potterheads
- Twihards
And with one of the Queen Elizabeths on the throne, it really felt like the Golden Age… of reading.
Harry Potter was a literary phenomenon responsible for kick-starting a wave of reading, arguably unseen before. And those readers are the Millennial generation.
They graduated from Hogwarts and fell in love with vampires only to pick up a bow and arrow and fight for justice, for family and friendship and a better future for all. Albeit, in a fictional dystopian world. One that might have foreshadowed the world we live in now to some degree. I’ll leave it to you to decide just how Orwellian it is?
It should be no surprise then that the Millennials who grew up satiated on a diet of books and adventures, imagination and wonder are the generation who read the most now.
Which begs the question, do we need another literary phenomenon like Harry Potter, Twilight and The Hunger Games to breathe life into the decaying corpse of reading?
Or is the Golden Age of reading a wreck in an ocean of lost hope?
The digital era is now a wave we are all learning to ride. But surely there’s space on the surfboard for a story or two?
Perhaps we authors just have to create our own waves.
Unearth the magic of nature with the epic coming of age fantasy
