Scroll through any visual-first social media right now and you’ll see it: Scenes from a literary adaptationdominating Netflix. Snaps of warm drinks and cozy blankets brushing up against tomes. Stacks of books with captions radiating enthusiasm for knowledge. It’s hot literature fall.
There are corners of the internet dedicated to discussing and logging the books we’ve read, but beyond BookTok and Bookstagram, celebrities like Dua Lipa, Kaia Gerber and Dakota Johnson are posing with their book club recommendations. In Hollywood, we’re not just getting adaptations of the latest romance novel or YA obsession (although no shade there); some of the biggest and buzziest releases are taking as their source material capital-l Literature. Renditions of East of Eden,The Odyssey and Sense and Sensibility are prompting people to dig up their copies of the classics. Trendy books are fashionable accessories.
Reading is hot right now, and looking like a reader makes you look hot. For years, book lovers have struggled with the idea that reading performatively is a shallow endeavor that reveals some deeper moral failing, as if you’re not pure of heart because you want to post about reading Infinite Jest more than you want to enjoy its prose (and who would do that?). But is it really such a bad thing?
Even as literature permeates pop culture, people are reading for pleasure less than ever before. The Atlantic declared that “the end of reading is here.” One of the biggest influencers in the world, Alix Earle, blithely announced that she’s never read a book.
In a way, turning reading into a sexy aesthetic that’s fun to post about might be our best shot at preserving what is rapidly becoming a lost art.
Why reading for the aesthetic totally counts
“I got back into reading because I wanted to make a book Insta account, and I had to read to do that,” Meaghan, a 33-year-old content creator in New York, tells me.
She picked up Scythe and Sparrow by Brynne Weaver, part of a BookTok-famous dark romance series, and that revived the love of reading that she lost touch with over the years when life got busy. Reading is a solitary endeavor, but her Bookstagram has created a community where she can chat with others about what she’s read. It might not have happened if she didn’t lean into her impulse to read for content.
I know this firsthand. In a less busy time of my life, I too got sucked so deeply into the rabbit hole of BookTok, I read more than 365 books in a year — two years in a row. A beautiful book or a compelling review online would catch my eye, and I’d sprint to get my hands on a copy so I could feel like I was a part of the conversation around it. Years later, people still think of me as that woman who reads a lot, and I admit that’s pretty hot.
People like Meaghan and me have been called “shallow” and “performative” for letting the aesthetics of reading consume us. Maybe we are.
“If you enjoy reading, great. Read. But carrying books around or talking about books purely to impress people seems a bit hollow,” Ricci Masero, who works in marketing, tells me. “You’re spending time managing a fake version of yourself instead of actually being you. That will eventually eat away at your soul.”
But what if you fake it until you eventually makeit?
Reading is like lifting weights for your brain, Zack Barnes, who directs the Center for Literacy at Austin Peay State University, tells me. The more you do it, the stronger you get and the more likely you are to keep at it. It doesn’t matter if your initial motivation is getting smarter or looking hotter.
“We are at the moment where fewer people are reading books than ever before,” Barnes tells me. “In the age of distraction, I don’t care why you are reading or what you are reading. I just care that you are reading.”
Reading for community
Though the act itself involves a lot of shutting up and sitting by yourself, reading can also be a social practice. Sepita Hatami, an English and literacy teacher, tells me that literacy is “not only what happens between a reader and a page. It also includes the ways people talk about books, display them, recommend them, annotate them, identify with genres and use reading to enter particular communities.”
There’s long been a stereotype that literacy is at odds with aesthetics. Readers are portrayed as nerds in pop culture, and we’re constantly reminded of the cliché that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. But Hatami explains that reading has always been social, aspirational and status-driven, just as much as it is educationally important and intellectually stimulating.
“A person may initially buy a book because it photographs well, because it is popular on BookTok or because being a reader fits an identity they want to inhabit,” Hatami says. “But identities are often rehearsed before they are fully internalized.”
So you might pretend to be a reader before you actually become one, and that’s fine. But you do actually have to read. If you’re collecting the books you see online but not cracking them open, you’re just a consumer.
It’s not that big of a leap from consumer to reader, though. Jenny Forwark, a librarian, says reading habits are easy to form because “the magic happens only when the book is read” — not when the purchase is made.
Bernie Smith, a blogger, saw this all the time when she was working as a librarian — a popular author would release a new book, then patrons would put holds on it for weeks because everyone was talking about it. Then they kept coming back.
Leaning into the aesthetics of reading isn’t an entirely new phenomenon either, Smith adds.
“Libraries have leaned into the aesthetics of reading for years. We have ‘READ’ posters of celebrities with their favorite books, and nobody asked whether they finished them,” she tells me. “Even the phrase ‘beach read’ shows the aesthetic has always been part of reading. Not everyone finishes their vacation book, but the idea of being someone who reads on vacation has kept books in suitcases for decades.”
Reading to be a part of cultural conversation counts, too
When Savannah, a 32-year-old from Pennsylvania, watched The Odysseydiscourse pass her by before she could finish reading the book, she vowed to stay ahead of the curve with East of Eden. It worked: She had lots to say about how the novel was adapted for the screen in her group chats.
“We had lots of discussion about how [showrunner] Zoe Kazan treated Cathy, about the distance between history and memory and the larger ideas about fate in terms of the trajectory of the nation,” she tells me with enthusiasm.
According to the Google Trends newsletter, search interest in book adaptations hit an all-time high this year — in early October, East of Eden, Verity and The Love Hypothesis were the top entries. John Steinbeck’s 74-year-old novel saw a 200% boost in sales since Netflix announced that it would be adapted to a miniseries starring Florence Pugh.
Sophie Vershbow, who co-hosts theIt Was A Book First podcast about new book-to-screen adaptations, says her goal is always to experience the book as the author wrote it.
“The question is often presented as, ‘which is better, the book or the movie?’ but the best screen adaptations aren’t in competition with theirracters or a world I’m already obsessed with in a way that adds on to my original reading experience without eroding it in the process.”
She said Sandra Hüller’s karaoke scene in the film adaptation of Project Hail Maryis a great example of this — it added a ton of emotional depth to a character who was lacking in the book version.
Months ago, on the heels of Jacob Elordi’s turn as a hot Frankenstein’s monster and Wuthering Heights’ sexy brooding Heathcliff, I asked English teachershow they felt about their students watching the movie before reading the book. They were unequivocally thrilled. Whatever it takes to get kids interested works for them.
So in the end, it actually doesn’t matter whether you’re reading to emulate your childhood hero Rory Gilmore, a pop star with an impossibly chic life or a random person who’s really good at curating books to read on public transit. Just don’t forget to savor it. That’s what builds a lifelong habit, literacy experts say.
Might as well get your transformation started during hot lit girl fall.
