We all want to be a part of Dua Lipa’s book club, Service95, or to know what Kendall Jenner’s latest read is. We absolutely need to know what books Zendaya and Tom Holland were swapping on vacation in Italy and then buy those books to carry them around. But here’s the problem: are we buying those books simply for the look? Too often, people are toting around books that make them “look” smart, skimming large parts of books to make a certain quota of books read, and forcing themselves into reading books they don’t like so they can fit a certain aesthetic.
Social media is host to several crazy book phenomena, fueling this trend of performative reading. You must always be “on” in public, putting on a character that is perceived as interesting. This is especially apparent when discussing the rhetoric around celebrities reading. There are many Instagram accounts dedicated to celebrity book recommendations, most notably @celebbookrecs. If a celeb has talked about or been spotted with a book, they’ll end up on these Instagram accounts.
There’s a strange sort of voyeurism that we participate in when people are reading in public. We might stare them down to determine what book they’re reading, and when some people see men enjoying books on public transit, they’ve decided they’ve come face-to-face with their future husband — because a man reading must mean he’s smart. Take the @hotdudesreading Instagram account for example; the account is dedicated to posting candid pictures of men reading in public.
But what if these people aren’t really reading for the joy of the book, instead reading because they know how it makes them look? What if they know the value of a book as a status symbol? This past summer, a video went viral of a man performatively reading on the street at a café. In the clip, it’s clear that he’s using the importance of being seen with a book to his advantage.
This is seemingly justified, as some book content creators have admitted that they just skim books and don’t even enjoy reading.
In a world where having a book in your hands is more important than actually reading it, we also tend to overbuy books. Bibliophilia is a word that the Merriam-Webster dictionary gives two definitions to: the, “great or excessive love of books,” and also, “enthusiastic of extreme interest in collecting books.” What we’ve seen in the age of overconsumption is the excessive purchasing of books. Book hauls are becoming all the rage on social media, and it seems more often than not that we buy books we have no intention of reading just to say we own them.
Not only are we seeing these gluttonous hauls on BookTok, but we are also seeing people stray away from the kindness and community-building that have typically defined reading communities. Specifically, BookTokers are dismissive of those who read romance or fantasy, claiming that these aren’t intellectual novels. These are the types of people who opt for classic literature and will jump at every opportunity to tell you all about the book that’s conveniently placed in their hand as a prop.
There’s also the trend of BookTok making people think that every book has “spice” in it. People will see books by James Joyce, for example, being spoken about online and ask, “Is there smut?” Many people take this as BookTok destroying people’s understanding of what smut is and what the purpose of sex scenes in novels serves. There are tasteful ways to incorporate intimate scenes in novels, in ways that drive stories forward. There is also a place for books that are just smut, because there is an audience for it. As long as people are reading, both of these types of books are justified.
What we are also seeing more and more of on book-centric social media platforms is a pushback against books as a political agent. The commercialization of books on BookTok and Bookstagram has made it so people forget the actual purpose of literature as a whole. Literature and art are used as social devices and books in themselves are inherently political.
In order to understand this, we need to understand the word “politics.” This word derives from the Greek word, “polis,” meaning community. Since books are used to bring communities together and words are the most effective ways of spreading messages, books are political. If books weren’t political, then why would there be a whole push to ban certain books?
Amid all of these online crazes, it seems as though readers have lost the plot. Literature was made to be enjoyed as art, so keep enjoying it. You can take on a 600-page, 5-book fantasy series with smut, a 300-page classic novel, or a 200-page closed-door romance, and you’d still be a reader no matter what. Just don’t forget the importance of literature as a social device…and stop pretending to read to look cool.
What's Your Reaction?
