Spending the majority of her time working through pre-med courses, Kiana Wing who is a 22-year-old attending UCLA, reads over 100 books a year.
Instagram, a social media platform for uncovering relations, forging contents, and content sharing that allows for free reign of creativity, has opened a domain for book lovers. We call this ‘Bookstagram’.
Kiana has been on Instagram for about 9 months now and garnered a following of over 1,200 bookworms under the tag: @kianasbooks. Over the span of these many months, she has posted book reviews, coffee shop tours that are ideal for studying, and photo dumps of her current week. She averages 200-300 likes per post and Kiana’s comment section is full of book readers admiring her opinions and story intellect all the while giving their own short word reviews in tangent.
And you’d think, being a pre-med biology major at UCLA, Kiana would be spending 80 hours mulling over textbooks, homework, and notes. Rather and more shockingly, my interviewee
says ‘efficiency’ has given way to her reading goals reaching well over a hundred. However, it mustn’t be solely her efficiency but both her intelligence and quick wit.
In this interview you’ll hear Kiana talk about her sparked interest in reading once high school ended. She believes due to the forced reading in school curriculum, books for leisure were out of the question and thrown out of the window of her interests. Yet after four years of reading absences, college commenced and she found herself picking up her first fiction novel since she was 14.
Reading fantasy, romance, and ya books, Kiana Wing has built a palace of stories around herself. She believes she’s lived a hundred lives, traveled to thousands of fictional and fantastical places, and met many people through pages, who some she’ll love forever.
When looking at her shelves, Kiana guesses she has at the very least 150 physical books, and over 100 downloaded on her kindle. Not limited to physical copies, Kiana is an avid fan of audio books when she is on the road or e-books when class is in session and her book cannot wait.
Bookstagram is a niche group on the internet where Kiana has never felt more welcome and close to people who live across the world. Her ‘Booksta’ account has opened up opportunities and even introduced our friendship.