Reading trashy books is one of life’s great joys. But presenting them as great literature just because everyone else is reading them closes readers off to more difficult but rewarding works that genuinely challenge them. On the surface, BookTok seems to encourage reading, but in the long term it reflects the broader crisis of the humanities. No longer are great works of literature a vehicle for self-development or understanding the inner lives of others. Books are now just another way to curate a performative self online, even as we read—and understand—less and less.
“Reading Is Dead. And We Killed It.” The title combines hyperbole with a tasteful Nietzschean wink. Those who recognize the source may congratulate themselves on belonging to the remnant who still recognize such things. Serious reading was our God, but we killed it; now the madman brings the news to the Last Men — or, rather, the last teenage girls — and they blink before returning to their dark-romance novels.
The “we” suggests confession, but the article’s tone is accusatory. BookTok influencers, publishing executives, algorithms and shallow young readers committed the crime. The cultivated reader is invited to inspect the body. He may shake his head, click his tongue, share the article and feel morally awake. This is just an upmarket version of doomscrolling.
Social media has given us unfiltered access to the reflexive thoughts of millions of people. Naturally, much of what we find there sounds vain, imitative, sentimental and stupid. Had we possessed a real-time transcript of what teenage girls said to one another in 1956, or even 1756, we might have been equally alarmed. What is new is not human shallowness but its continuous public transcription. We mistake unprecedented access for unprecedented decline.
The cultural-lament thinkpiece is a humanities-branded tour of Bedlam. The guide points through the bars: look how the lunatics entertain themselves now. The visitors recoil, exchange knowing glances and return comfortably to the carriage. No one inside the asylum is addressed. No one outside it is asked to do anything.
This is particularly odd on a site called Persuasion. Who is supposed to be persuaded? Presumably, most readers who frequent such a publication already believe that sustained attention is good, algorithms are corrosive and great books deserve to survive. The essay reaches the cognoscenti, confirms their diagnosis and allows them to signal their concern to one another. It condemns reading as identity performance while functioning chiefly as identity performance for a different class of reader.
Telling people to read better books is easy. Creating conditions in which reading becomes rewarding and self-perpetuating is difficult. Social media succeeds not merely because it offers cheap stimulation, but because it offers recognition. Someone answers your posts, laughs at your jokes, notices what you noticed. However superficial the exchange, it associates words and ideas with friendship, attention, humor and being listened to.
Against this, the defender of reading offers solitary penance, an intellectual eating of vegetables. Read better books because you ought to. Read them because your attention span is deteriorating, democracy is endangered, the canon is disappearing and civilization may collapse if you do not. The book bears the combined weight of homework and emergency preparedness. No wonder the young reader returns to the place where her friends are.
Serious readers increasingly resemble stylites sitting atop pillars in the desert. But a reading culture requires more than readers alone with a book. It requires a social ecology around reading: people with whom a remembered passage may be shared, occasions when a book can enter an ordinary conversation, someone curious enough to ask a second question. Then solitary reading feeds the common life, and the common life sends the reader back to solitude. “That reminds me of something I read last week…” The sentence contains an invitation. It makes a book sound interesting and relevant.
Bright young readers are like baby sea turtles scrambling from the sand toward the water while social-media seagulls circle overhead. A few will reach the sea by force of temperament alone. Most will be picked off before they encounter anyone who can make sustained reading feel socially alive. Standing on the shore and shouting “Swim harder!” will not improve their odds.
If we want more readers, the necessary work will be local, patient and largely unmeasurable. Keep company with books where others can see it. Speak of them without self-indulgence. Remember what people tell you. Ask the second question. Make seriousness hospitable without pretending that every book is equally serious. Give others some reason to suspect that reading leads not merely to superior opinions, but to richer conversation and better company.