In her Ted talk, Jacqueline Woodson talks about her background in reading when she was younger and how important reading, especially reading slowly, is in her life. She describes many reasons for reading and reading slowly like gaining inspiration, forming a connection with the author or the characters, going “places we never thought we’d go”, introducing “us to people we never thought we’d meet”, and showing “us worlds that we might have missed”. 

A reason that Woodson gave for reading that resonated with me was that reading takes “us places that we never thought we’d go”. I am a firm believer that reading fosters imagination because the words in a novel, a textbook, or a magazine describes a certain image or series of images while our brain manipulates these images that we have in mind. It helps to open our minds to new possibilities and new ideas that we may have never thought of before that help us experience and analyze people and events in our lives in different ways. We think of different types of worlds that probably are not even real, but real enough to us that we find meaning in it. Woodson also mentions that she writes books that are “meant to be read slowly, to be savored”. I found this part very interesting especially since she contrasted this idea with technology moving fast. I believe that things move so fast in this world that we, as human beings, never slow down and really think and savor a certain moment. When slowing down especially when reading, your mind can bring about new thoughts that you would have never thought of if you had rushed. I think that slowing down and taking a moment to step back and think is a very important quality to have in life. 

A podcast that I decided to revisit from earlier this semester is the podcast on Hotel Corona. I do not think that when writing my blog post on that topic that I fully grasped what Hotel Corona actually was. Now thinking about it, I am genuinely shocked that something like this exists. Normally, when people get the coronavirus they would check themselves into the hospital, but to learn the people checked themselves into a hotel with other people who have coronavirus left me very surprised.