Post-pandemic, being a reader feels like a small culture of its own. This culture can be studied through today’s Tiktok and 2010s Tumblr. The reader girl is mysterious, she wears a certain type of fashion and matches her books with her thick sweaters; she loves fall weather and Gilmore Girls; she reads at cafes and on public transportation. Perhaps it can be exclusively studied through social media — I haven’t met a type-A reader in my life.
I think this romanticization does a great deal of good. Anyone who believes that more young people should read should agree — the allure of the coziness and quiet is part of what drew me to get back into reading, and I’m sure it has done the same for many other people. What is not necessarily a contradiction to this good but a layer of complexity is that getting back into reading is not this romantic– it’s hard.
Part of the reason why reading can be hard is arguably the reason why most people should be reading: attention spans are changing. I have heard friends brag, ironically, that they haven’t read a book in full for pleasure since their childhoods. Every person born after the mid-90s has heard an older adult criticize our generation’s technology habits. I don’t think these habits always deserve the demonization they are commented on with. Furthermore, I think a more valuable and constructive cultural discussion should take into account that Gen-Z’s tendencies when it comes to the internet are symptomatic of how the world has developed in the 21st century. Our brains are elastic and have adapted extremely well to receiving short-form bursts of information through social media. The antagonization of internet-fixated teens addresses none of this.
Seeing myself struggle to pay attention while reading is what motivated me to get back into the hobby I had made of it when I was younger. Two goals sprouted from this motivation; Firstly, I wanted to somehow repair my ability to pay attention, full, dedicated attention, to something that is less addictive and to a certain extent more valuable than scrolling on Instagram. Secondly, I wanted to prove to myself that I could read. Something that people don’t take into consideration when reading to ‘mend’ their attention levels is that there is a natural friction that results from this. Part of the way to become a reader is to guide yourself into habitual readership through little actions. This is not the path I originally took. It should be obvious that when a person is compelled one way for so long that direct opposite action is uncomfortable, but at least for me, it really wasn’t.
When I wanted to get back into reading, I had certain books in mind: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce, to see how it is a soul could be captured in a book to such literary acclaim, Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein, for its avant-garde style, and the later works of Henry James, an author who I began to love through Daisy Miller — whose work I had been told, offhand, by a father of a friend, that I would “just not understand.” I started with a book of this caliber in my Junior year of high school and felt the discomfort I have just mentioned. It was an early 20th-century novel like those above; I had the capacity to fully understand it, and I certainly started to, but I did not finish the book.
I truly started to read again this past winter. It was my senior year in high school, I had gotten into college, and my school work was ramping down. I started to hypothesize the opinion I pose here: that the pressure from the literary world to read ‘difficult,’ life-changing, and decades or centuries-old literature prevents more people from becoming readers. When I knew I wanted to start reading again, I chose to read a Y/A romance novel first. It was a good book, and I enjoyed it a lot! However, it was not on my original reading list with the novels mentioned above.
My opinion on the value of drawing back from reading more ‘difficult’ books has one gap: what if you don’t want to become a habitual reader? What if you just want to read one pre-war avant-garde novel? Like in my case, you may not even get through the book; if you do, you may not be used to the close reading arguably required to understand the intent of the author through language and technique.
There is a stigma against “easy” books. This can be seen in the discourse around Colleen Hoover. I am not a Hoover fan– my compulsion to state this outright already says a great deal about the stigma. She has come under fire in the past year for her insensitive and harmful depictions of domestic violence and abuse. However, this is only a part of the Hoover stigma, and it does not tell the full story of why I or many other people jump to say that they are not a fan of her work.
Part of this has to do with the genre she writes in– romance. It has long been seen as the ‘women’s genre,’ of housewives and preteen girls alike. Part has to do with the elitist undercurrent of readership. Her work does not belong to the Western canon — that is, the collection of high-culture books that literary snobs cling to. These stigmas are magnified for the female reader; How much more appealing would it be to see myself through a stranger’s eyes reading Dostoevsky than a romance book with a sultry woman and a shirtless Fabio Lanzoni on the cover!
The majority of written work does not belong to the elite Western canon. This is exactly why it is elite. I have recently seen a philosophy of reading emerging against intellectual snobbery: enjoying art for enjoyment’s sake and reading for reading’s sake. My recent return to reading has improved my academic life and informed my personal.
I have read one to three books a month since I started last winter. I read Henry James in the spring; in June I read Hemingway and Brautigan, whose styles are wonderfully simplistic and sincere; I read another young adult novel in July.
