Jose Alberto Gutierrez’s life would never be the same again after finding a copy of Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy in the trash 20 years ago. It happened while he was driving his garbage truck through wealthier neighbourhoods at night and seeing books that were thrown away. It lit his desire to start rescuing books from the trash. He used to take home between 50 and 60 books every morning after his nine-hour shift that ran from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m.. Eventually, he turned his book collection into a community library for children from low income families.

Colombia’s capital city of Bogota has 13 million residents and 19 public libraries. However, these libraries tend to be far away from where rural and poorer communities live. The option of buying new books is non-existent for families struggling to make ends meet. Gutierrez’s library is true representation of how one man’s trash can be another’s treasure. Having access to a library of books and being taken away instantly to another world while absorbed in a book is a luxury for the kids. “I think we are simply a bridge between people who have books and those who don’t have anything,” he said humbly about his remarkable attempt.

Gutierrez grew up poor, and his family could not afford to educate him beyond primary school. Nevertheless, his mother was an eager reader and read stories to him every night. Her love for books left a deep impression on Gutierrez, who never let a lack of formal education stop him from reading classics. He once said, “There’s nothing more beautiful than having a book in your pocket, in your bag or inside your car.”

Today, his library, titled “The Strength of Words”, occupies most of his home, and is piled from floor to ceiling with fiction and non-fiction titles. He has also roped in his family to expand this mission. Mrs Gutierrez, for example, selects and repairs the books her husband finds.

As word began to spread about his amazing project, fifty-six-year-old Gutierrez earned himself the nickname “Lord of the Books”. In spite of all this, Gutierrez is not yet content to call it a day. He continues to search bins for reading material.

Today’s teenage generation has been brought up surrounded by one single stereotype (刻板印象): the so-called MTV generation. We’re all constantly glued to our phone and TV screens, the boys are addicted to video games and the girls prefer posting pictures of themselves on the Internet. Both could watch TV series all day and both could do without a book. How accurate is this stereotype?

It turns out that most of them could actually do without a book. “The Kids & Family Reading Report” found that only 24% of 12 to 14-year-olds read five to seven days a week. The percentage goes down to a mere 17% when it comes to 15 to 17-year-olds. And it may come as no surprise that 76% of the former visit social media websites on a daily basis.

Reading frequently has many great benefits: it develops your verbal abilities (especially for kids, it will greatly improve their vocabulary), it improves your focus and concentration, it enhances your imagination, it reduces stress and it’s entertaining! Not only that but research has shown that people who read for pleasure show a greater appetite to engage with stories, texts and learning.

The popular TV show “Game of Thrones” (《权利的游戏》) certainly seems to have motivated a lot of teens to buy George R.R. Martin’s best-selling book series. Sales skyrocketed after the show was first put on in 2011, selling 9 million copies in one year, with many teens and young adults believed to have contributed to this statistic. In contrast, the book series had “only” sold 5 million from the first book’s release till 2011.

With nowadays’ teenagers apparently constantly glued to their screens, TV series “Game of Thrones” seems to have inspired a lot of them to take a break and read a book. Maybe teenagers will end up being the ones solving the issue after all.

In August 2020, Kate Wilson, a 16-year-old from Shrewsbury, posted on the social media video platform TikTok a series of sentences from books she had read. Set to a piece of soft music, the short video plays out as Wilson holds up copies of the books. “You have been the last dream of my soul.” from A Tale of Two Cities. “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same,” from Wuthering Heights. It has been viewed more than 1.2 million times.

These posts, called BookTok, can attract millions of views, and light an appreciation of books in young readers again. “I started reading again after six years when I came across BookTok for the first time last October,” says Mireille Lee, 15.

Adam Silvera’s 2017 novel They Both Die at the End is one of the books to have benefited from the BookTok effect. In March, it shot to the top of the teen fiction charts, selling more than 4, 000 copies a week. The book has sold more than 200, 000 copies in the UK after thousands of posts about it.

Publishers are watching with interest. Publisher Horrox says, “There’s something about the fact that it is under a minute. People who are consuming this content watch a 32-second video and someone’s like: ‘This book has romance, and it’s really heartbreaking. Thankfully, it’s only a fiction.’ And then the viewers think: ‘Oh, OK, those are all things that I’m interested in. I’ll go buy it.’” By December 2020, Wilson was being contacted regularly by publishers, who had realized that TikTok “really does sell books”.

Jenny is 22, and says, “I thought TikTok was ridiculous last year before the first lockdown. I really did think it was just for 14-year-olds, but BookTok is such a lovely community. There are people who like the same books as me, and I can talk about the books that I like. It just seems a little bit magical.”