Keep Reading and Carry On: Mediated Reading During COVID-19

Marsden, Stevie

Abstract

n the 1990s Oprah’s Book Club became a significant media spectacle, with her televised book club conversations with readers and authors acquiring massive audiences. Through these televised discussions, Oprah’s Book Club brought mass-reading experiences into personal domestic spaces, with thousands of readers engaging from the comfort of their own home. In the UK, the television presenters Richard and Judy have replicated this format, to varying degrees of success, since 2001, with the most recent reiteration of their TV book club programme, ‘Keep Reading and Carry On’, broadcast in the summer of 2020 during the UK’s national lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic. A deliberate nod to the broader cultural and political rhetoric of resilience that was popular during the national lockdown, and which borrowed heavily from jingoistic wartime discourse, ‘Keep Reading and Carry On’ illustrated how televised book clubs are not only opportunities for readers to engage in mass reading but also a kind of escapist comfort television aiming to provide semblances of familiarity and domestic ordinariness. This is further exemplified by the fact that other TV book clubs, such as the Zoe Ball Book Club founded in 2019, are usually broadcast on weekend mornings, a time of the week that is associated with respite and domestic routine(s). Accordingly, this chapter will examine how televised book clubs engage in a form of mediated ordinariness, which reflects and assumes traditional conceptions of reading as a leisure activity placed in private domestic spaces, whilst simultaneously performing and mediating reading through television.

Citation

Marsden, S. (2023). Keep Reading and Carry On: Mediated Reading During COVID-19. In A. Ensslin, J. Round, & B. Thomas (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to Literary Media (452-467). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003119739-41

• Publication Date: Jul 20, 2023
• Deposit Date: May 2, 2024
• Publisher: Routledge
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Pages: 452-467
• Book Title: The Routledge Companion to Literary Media
• ISBN: 9781003119739
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003119739-41