Book clubs are for phonies Good readers don’t relate to characters

I’ve been looking into the literacy crisis, and I think I now understand it. These days young people are either making videos about how much they love books, or masturbating over werewolves. Either way, few of them are reading very much, and practically no one is reading in depth.

Such are my conclusions after spending time on BookTok, a.k.a. the bit of TikTok where supposed book-lovers like to hang out. BookTok is massive, with more than 77 million posts, most of them by young women. Last month it launched an official bestseller list, which turned out to be full of sexually explicit romance and “romantasy” books: the kind where a mysteriously suave basilisk accidentally spills coffee over a young lady as she is leaving a candle shop, and the rest is written in the stars.

BookTok’s bestseller list is generated by combining sales figures with the activity patterns of users. A typical post involves filming yourself holding a tantalizingly anonymous pile of books, then revealing the covers to camera, one by one, with maximum drama and enthusiasm. You have about a minute to convey your feelings without losing your audience, so there’s no need to go all Harold Bloom. “These five God-tier novels left my jaw on the floor” will do.

As well as recommendations, there are jokey self-referential vids about BookTok itself, helping to mythologize the sort of sensitive, introverted, sex-mad dreamer who uses it. Sometimes you get discussion of the classics — “The Count of Monte Cristo is CRISPY, it is CLEAN”, as one user puts it  — but mostly it features contemporary stuff. You can also find information about how to leave the house to attend a newly popular sort of event known as a silent book club — something we older folk would call “going to the library”.

The aged generations have their own online platforms, though they are more staid and celebrity-driven. Boomers have Oprah’s book club, which has given them regular doses of uplift, inspiration, and empowerment since 1996. Amazon has just bought the rights to it. Gen X-ers have Reese Witherspoon’s hugely successful club; its owner likes to “consciously curate the stories and autonomy of women, championing voices and platforming authors too often overlooked”. Millennials have Dua Lipa’s newsletter — a subject I have visited before — now recommending “Books To Read When You’re Burnt Out & Only Have The Attention Span For A Short Story” or “Books For Reinventing Yourself Without Resorting To Cutting Your Hair”. It all feels quite intimate, like a trusted friend is talking to you, but also someone more glamorous than your actual pals: a world-renowned tastemaker, getting you in on emerging trends.

As the Economist noted last week in a piece on the rise of celebrity book clubs, the prevailing mood is relentlessly positive. Passion is a prerequisite, and joy at the reading experience non-negotiable — unless you are temporarily heartbroken by the plot. All the positivity seems inextricably bound up with progressive politics. Book clubs started off as scripture discussion groups for women, and not much has changed, mood wise. Titles are chosen for their improving messages, often tied to the admirable ethnic or sexual identity of the author. It is implicitly understood that no-one is allowed to be mean.

A blurb for a civil service virtual book club last year captures the ambiance, inviting participants whether gay or straight to “join the vibrant world of literature and inclusivity … sharing insights and fostering meaningful discussions on the power of queer narratives” — with a note about desired standards of behavior attached. “We expect that everyone attending one of our events will also choose their words carefully and sensitively.” Translation: if you are looking for an exhilaratingly savage takedown of Audre Lorde, you had better go somewhere else.

All this fastidious suppressing of bad vibes gets suffocating quite quickly. Recurring fantasies in the online book world are of a “cozy”, “safe” place for reading. Ideally, as you read you should be in a dedicated “nook”, swaddled in beige blankets. The imagery seems like shorthand for so much more than soft furnishings. Indeed, if modern book culture was an interior design mood, it would be cottagecore: a crackling fire in the grate, snow banking against the mullioned windows, a cat on your legs. Admittedly, the Gen Z version would have a sex-crazed basilisk chained up outside, and the Gen X-ers would have a serial killer peering through the window; but still, as Léon once said to an approving Emma in Madame Bovary: “what is better than to sit by one’s fireside in the evening with a book, while the wind beats against the window and the lamp is burning?”

Here Flaubert was satirizing an approach which treats novels as a means of romantic escape or as emotional catharsis, though I’m not sure that the thousands of people discussing his book online have noticed his point. A modern day Gustave would have been equally devastating on the popular idea that reading is a way of improving your mental health. Dreamy, sexually frustrated Emma would have made a great BookTokker: “I adore stories that rush breathlessly along, that frighten one. I detest commonplace heroes and moderate sentiments, such as there are in nature.” She is talking about her favorite Walter Scott novels, but she might just as well be talking about Rebecca Yarros’s dragon riders.

Criticism of book club culture is generally frowned upon as snobbish and counterproductive. Publishers are not going to complain about it — while sales are generally down, their figures are heavily dependent on viral attention. Authors such as Yarros and Sarah J. Maas have sold millions of copies in the last few years, largely thanks to BookTok. And those worried about the decline in literacy might protest: shouldn’t we just be grateful that young people are reading things longer than a few lines and getting excited about them? Along with the mandatory positivity about books, there is a feeling we’re supposed to grin and bear the surrounding discourse.

But there are downsides, and not just for authors who don’t have the potential for virality, or for young men, put off reading for life by the cartoonishly feminized aesthetic. A less obvious one concerns the death of criticism, in a sense that takes account of form as well as content: a concentrated unpicking of language in terms of things like rhythm, imagery, and rhetorical devices, and the interplay of these with style, plot, and major themes. This requires attention to chapters, paragraphs, sentences, and not just the whole. It means forgetting about how a book makes you feel, or what inspiring message it conveys, and getting dispassionately deep into the mechanics. It means stopping treating the book as a cool experience like a funfair ride or a sunset, and thinking of it as a deliberate creation of a particular mind instead.

Literature departments obsessed with social justice spend less and less time on close reading; overexcited heads turn towards saving the world, and away from the text as an object of independent interest. Inevitably pressed for space, newspaper book reviews are not very good at deep analysis either; and in any case these are disappearing too. An article in the New York Times last month noted that there were only five full-time literary critics left in whole of the States.

In this respect, I had hopes for Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett’s new podcast The Book Club, but they too seem to focus on the social context of narratives and on emotional effects, rather than literary technique. And you certainly aren’t going to learn how to do close reading on BookTok. It’s the sort of thing that takes concentration and time and is very unlikely to go viral.

The gap creates a problem for discernment. With the focus on the macro not the micro, there is a general decrease in appreciation of the range of effects that literary devices can create. In looking only for the emotional power inherent in a work, or what a book can tell us about contemporary society, readers are missing huge parts of what can make a masterpiece so good: anacoluthon, apostrophe, assonance, and the rest of the rhetorical alphabet, exponentially breeding meanings as they interact with one other. And more basically, lack of familiarity also means readers can totally misunderstand what is going on in the story.

Take the case of free indirect discourse, which, it seems, is increasingly hard for present-day readers to comprehend. When Flaubert’s narrator describes how Emma, who has just taken a lover and is now looking at herself delightedly in the mirror, “was entering upon marvels where all would be passion, ecstasy, delirium” we are not supposed to think he means it. Rather, in full knowledge of the heroine’s tendency to fantasize, we are invited to share the joke of her delusion.

But when popular approaches to literature urge us to search constantly for the heartfelt and sincere in a text, not the playful, witty, or oblique, you get a flat-footed literalism in the reader; one that is blind to subtle signs of something more ambivalent and interesting. And the fewer people that understand indications of ironic distance, the less likely it is that authors will try it out in new writing; for with an oblivious audience prone to misunderstanding, it becomes risky to play.

In the essay on Flaubert in his masterly Lectures on Literature, Nabokov wrote that “Only children can be excused for identifying themselves with the character in a book, or enjoying badly written adventure stories; but this is what Emma and Léon do”. It is what a lot of us do, ultimately to the detriment of the quality of thought in the public realm. Delicately wrought tools of self-expression and communication, developed over centuries, and able to convey endless depth and interest, are falling out of use. And we are too busy feeling moved, inspired, or filled with lust about werewolves to notice.

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