Transcription
There is no denying that reading is cool again. Book talk is blowing up. Celebrities are posting online with their books that they're reading. There's an online trend of hot girls read. You can even buy slips with "reader" on it to really signify to everyone that you are one of those people that reads Joan Didion and Eve Babitz.
And with this popularity and the persona of being a reader, of course, also comes a lot of criticism. There's this online war against fake readers. People who only read romance or smut are seen as not real readers. Colleen Hoover fans are looked down upon by classics fans. People who only read for enjoyment should really pick up a classic or non-fiction in a while, 'cause that's not real reading.
But then the people who read Sylvia Plath and Albert Camus are actually also fake because they're clearly only reading to seem intellectual. Actually, everyone on BookTok or Bookstagram is clearly only reading for the aesthetic of it. People should critically engage more with the books they read, but the people who annotate too much and put too many tabs in their books are also clearly faking it.
Today I want to talk about the book girly, Joan Didion, Albert Camus-ification of reading. I made cold blue iced tea. Oh, wow. Okay. Ooh. I like, I like that. I want to start with a little anecdote. So, if you've been watching my channel, you know that I'm obsessed with *All About Love* by bell hooks. This is one of those rare books that was never recommended to me by anyone. I didn't hear people talk about it online. I just found it in a bookstore. I ended up loving it so much that I kept begging my friends to read it. I've annotated so much. And then about half a year later, I walked into Urban Outfitters in the home decor section and I saw that there were multiple stacks of this book lined up right next to the boob-shaped mugs and the frog-themed toothbrush holders, as if this book was just another trendy mini-skirt on the rack.
I also found out online that there was kind of a meme going on of men often photographing themselves with this book on their dating profile to appear like someone that has interesting opinions about love and is very open. And suddenly this book stopped just being a book I loved because I suddenly became aware of the image that surrounds this book. That this book has kind of become a fashion accessory that people put in their bag to appear intellectual, to appear having philosophical ideas about love. And it immediately made me question my own love for this book. I was thinking, "Oh my gosh, did I also fall into, like, this trap?" And more importantly, did I unknowingly all this time look like a fake intellectual for parading around this book that people are using as a fashion accessory? Did my authentic love for this book seem fake because it had been so commodified on the internet?
I think this is a great example of how what you read and what you choose to share with other people that you read have such an impact on the image that we create of ourselves. And that is what I mostly want to dive into today. And I want to do that by kind of going along, like, three major bookish personas that I see on the internet: the book girly, the TikTok book girly persona, the Sylvia Plath, Joan Didion, Albert Camus intellectual reader, dark academia girly. Um, and thirdly, the real authentic reader that really reads for real critical reasons. And of course, not everyone fits into one of these categories, but that is kind of the whole thing of internet personas is that no one actually fits into these categories. But we, we present ourselves in certain ways and we box people into things.
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Let's start with the book girly. When I'm talking about the book girly, I'm talking about the girl that watches a lot of BookTok, maybe posts on there. She is associated with reading fantasy, maybe reading smut, maybe Colleen Hoover, reading rom-com, fantasy novels. The aesthetic is very white, very girly. She likes to drink matcha. She likes to get her iced coffee. She's very relatable, just like you and I. There's a lot of relatable content about what it's like to be a reader girly, to sit with your friends on a comfy bed and reading books, to disappear into other worlds.
But it's also this type of girly that is associated with the "too many words" girl, if anyone remembers that. The girl that complained about there being too many words on the page of the book that she was reading and kind of became, like, the poster child for hatred of these types of girls that, according to the internet, aren't actually critically engaging with the books that they read. Their reading is just very shallow, very surface-level, and therefore not real, not what you're supposed to be doing with books. The book girly aesthetic is very fun. It is very relatable, but it doesn't really fit in our general idea of what a person who reads is like: an intellectual person that reads for, for challenging themselves.
Now, I have never self-identified as a book girly, but I sure as hell have been perceived as one. I got into reading and became a big reading fan when I was around 16 years old, or maybe even 15. Mostly when I discovered the *Twilight* books and, in continuation of that, discovered a lot of young adult fantasy novels. And all of my friends were reading these books, and it just made me so excited about reading as well. Being someone who reads has never really made me feel revered or seen as an intellectual. It, it mostly just made me feel like a nerd. Like I was one of those people that actually read the required reading books and maybe even enjoyed them a little bit. That did not make me cool. I was just a nerd. And then on top of that, I was very, very aware of the fact that the types of books that I was reading, they didn't really give you any kind of intellectual currency. You know, *Twilight*, *The Hunger Games*, *The Lunar Chronicles*. I, I've been, like, in this online book space for almost 10 years now, and I have had to endure many comments about not reading "real books." For example, a few years ago, I posted my top 10 favorite books, and I got a comment that said, "What a bunch of young adult crap," when only half of the books that I mentioned were actually young adult books. And those young adult books I mentioned because I read them when I was, you know, a young adult. Reminder that there are books that are not young adult novels. They do, in fact, exist, and you should read them. Again, on a video where it is not implied that I only read young adult novels, this is simply an assumption that people make.
*The Hunger Games*. Really? I thought this was a book about reading critically. Technically, this comes from a good place of people wanting others to read critically, to really intellectually engage with books. But I very quickly realized that this is kind of a false intention, and people really are coming at you in bad faith. 'Cause I noticed that if you even read a few perceived "sloppy" books, then every other book that you read becomes discredited. I've had people in real life not take my book recommendations seriously because, you know, they were looking for, like, a "real good book."
I spent my early 20s in an environment where Dostoevsky and Mishima were the topic of conversation. Mentioning Eastern European authors, the more unknown the better, garnered a lot of exciting looks from people in the group. But if I talked about how my mind was blown by *Piranesi* by Susanna Clarke, or how deeply *Radio Silence* by Alice Oseman impacted me, I could see people's eyes glaze over because they weren't familiar with those names. But there also clearly wasn't the assumption of, "Oh, it's an unknown author, and I'm sure it's, like, really interesting and esoteric." I could see that these titles were mentally shelved as not very deep just because they were coming out of my mouth. And that made me really frustrated because I just wanted to talk about books and about stories that deeply touched me. I didn't want to constantly fight this battle for my experience of art to be taken seriously just because the art that I was consuming didn't fit this mold of something that's probably really intellectual.
And in my early 20s, I very, very quickly realized that if I talked about reading *The Outsider* by Albert Camus, which I did, people would be very interested. And it clearly gave me a kind of, I'm going to keep calling it, intellectual currency. But when I talked about how much I loved *Bunny* by Mona Awad, which I had extensively tabbed, there are so many themes that I could talk about in this book, the same thing didn't happen. And strictly speaking, if we're talking about books that made me critically engage with it, that made me want to annotate and underline, made me think about it months after, *The Outsider* has that a little bit, but *Bunny* has that way more. But talking about reading *The Outsider* would make me seem like someone who likes to critically engage with the book and annotate and underline way more than talking about *Bunny*. Even though for me, it was made more true with *Bunny* than with *The Outsider* by Albert Camus.
And I think this has, like, subconsciously caused me to slowly move on from being a typical book girly to moving into the territory of the Sylvia Plath, Joan Didion, Albert Camus intellectual reader. This bookish archetype likes to read Dostoevsky and Plath and Camus. She writes with a pencil in her notebook. She uses gray highlighters, has a bit of a darker aesthetic. Her clothing is a little bit more alternative than the relatable book girly. This intellectual girly doesn't even need to be girly. This intellectual person probably frequents the vintage store a little more often. They look down on the people that like Colleen Hoover. They pride themselves on being critical readers.
So when I was at university, I did at some point, probably because of this frustration that I felt with people not really taking my thoughts seriously and taking my interest seriously, I felt this need to, I'll admit it, appear more intellectual. Recently, I read a really great essay by Rae Smith about poser ethics that I'm going to be mentioning a lot in this video. Uh, but she writes about why she reads and why people have the desire to read, and how this is often intrinsically linked with the desire to be seen as an intellectual person. She says, "For many people, one of the primary reasons to start reading is in the hopes of being seen as the type of person to read." This was certainly a large part of why I started reading, and I'll admit it, if no one else will, still to some extent an ongoing incentive. I think Rae Smith is an amazing essayist with super well-thought-out ideas, and even she admits that she started reading, and maybe still reads a little bit, to kind of fit into that mold of being an intellectual, and I actually think that it's a great thing to admit that about ourselves.
There's a lot of people online trying to, like, weed out the fake readers, often pointing to influencers and celebrities posing with books just to seem like readers. But I, I think it's good to kind of interrogate ourselves and think, "Hmm, how much of that has influenced me?" I personally definitely didn't get into reading to appear more intellectual, but I'm, I, I think it definitely contributed to me picking up more classics when I was like around 20 years old. I read Camus that year. I read *The Myth of Sisyphus*. I read the classic dystopians. I started reading more non-fiction. And I did feel really cool for reading philosophy novels.
Few years later, I became obsessed with watching TikToks of these Joan Didion, Sylvia Plath, Albert Camus readers. I love that these were such well-spoken girls that had already read all of Dostoevsky's work and Nietzsche's work and embodied a type of intellectuality that I only hoped I could reach at 18 years old. I guess I was for a little bit the type of person that gets criticized for reading only certain books just to appear intellectual, and I was definitely not the only one. I think many of the readers that really focus on these specific authors like Camus, Dostoevsky, Joan Didion, authors that have this reputation of being read by intellectuals, authors that if you associate yourself with them will create a more intelligent, deep image of yourself. I think a lot of people really honed in on those authors were very motivated by the idea of seeming more intellectual, which again, I think especially for girls makes a lot of sense. If you've had so much experience with not being taken seriously, you kind of start clasping onto things that will very easily make other people take you more seriously, even if that in itself is technically maybe an ingenuine way, um, to start reading books.
And this is, of course, also what critics notice. And this brings us to the third, I guess, online book archetype: the "real reader" trademark that calls out other people for not reading for real reasons. Together with the Sylvia Plath readers, they will call out the book girlies for not reading real deep intellectual books, for not critically engaging with books in the way that you should. But the "real reader" trademark will also call out the Sylvia Plath readers for only reading for the intellectual clout that it gives them. And this line of thinking is everywhere on the internet. People love calling out fakeness. Like I already talked about people making fun of guys on Hinge posing with *All About Love*. Or consider those countless pictures and videos of people reading in public, being ridiculed by the internet for being performative, for only reading to attract women or only reading to seem cool. You know, of course, there are all these people online that are not real readers, unlike us who are, of course, real readers.
Here's the thing. When we critique others for faking their image, it puts us in the camp of the good ones, the true authentic ones. But in doing so, we are also participating in image creation, in creating a certain image of ourselves. It's just that the "real reader" trademark is very invested in presenting themselves as a true, authentic, real reader as opposed to the fake ones. These people are criticizing other people for only reading for the aesthetic of it, and that they are too focused on, like, gorgeous bookshelves and pretty covers, and they're posting selfies of themselves reading at the beach. But by going online talking about how they're criticizing this and publishing think pieces about this and writing about how much they value critical reading, they are also themselves participating in creating a reading aesthetic for themselves. They are also building a reader persona.
The "real authentic reader" may think that they exist outside of this aesthetic of reading, but they're actually just as much a part of it as the people that are posing with, like, a cigarette and a crumpled paper bag of Camus. Except the pixels to their online image are not aesthetically pleasing photos. They are Colleen Hoover tabbed-down videos. And this is not necessarily a bad thing. I mean, I tend to even agree with the opinion of these people. I just think that we need to be honest to ourselves that we have to accept that most of us are actually at least slightly occupied with what other people are thinking of us, with creating an image of ourselves. And I think that once we accept that, we are more likely to realize that other people are not as shallow as we think that they are. That other people may have complex experiences just like we do.
Don't we all sometimes do things for the image that it creates of us? Especially if you are one, young and very occupied with what other people are thinking of you, and two, on the internet and constantly exposed to the internet. I don't think I have to go into explaining how being online really encourages you to commodify yourself, to brand yourself, to present yourself in a certain way. And if that's all you're consuming every day is just all these people that have these perfectly branded personalities, that's going to influence you. It's going to make you feel like you also need to think about how you present yourself to the world and what types of books you can talk about to elicit a certain response from others.
The "real authentic reader" trademark is very focused on weeding out the fakers, the posers. But whatever "poser" entails differs from person to person. I've seen it all. For some, it is all those that only read for entertainment. For others, it is everyone who reads genre fiction, anyone who reads mostly mainstream books. But it's also the people who seem to read too much or who annotate too much, or they take photos of books that are just a little too aesthetically pleasing to reflect a real love for reading. And Rae Smith very aptly describes this as "poser ethics." It is the paradigm in which insincere, surface-level aesthetics are more immediately real than the idea of complex, deeply felt, earnest engagement. We see a guy reading on a windowsill with a coffee and assume immediately that he must only be doing it to appear cool. We see someone annotating, overly annotating her books, and assume that it must just be performative. We are living in a world in which all action is perceived primarily as insincere, where it becomes inconceivable that someone could earnestly enjoy reading a book by their window with a cup of coffee. The critic lost in the world of poser ethics mistakenly believes that something being performative prevents it from being real and loses access in the process to a great deal of reality.
Here's what is missing in all those takedowns, all that weeding out of the fakers. Um, when I was in my short era of mostly reading books and reading philosophy because I knew it would get me be taken more seriously than if I continued to read more Marissa Meyer, is that I genuinely enjoyed those books that I read. I had a genuine interest in philosophy that I still have to this day. *1984*, *Brave New World*, and *A Clockwork Orange* are all books that I really, really liked. Maybe my motivations were a little bit ingenuine. I do think that they were very human and also common.
This is another quote by Rae Smith in her essay on poser ethics: "I think that the difference between authentically performed identity and an inauthentically performed identity is blurry at the best of times. And being a bit of a poser is usually the first step to becoming the real deal." So basically, what I'm proposing is this video is a more generous way of looking at the world where we're not constantly assuming that everything is just fake. Because like Rae Smith said in "Poser Ethics," just because it is performative doesn't mean that it is not real. Sometimes a performance is an exaggeration of a real feeling, a kind of desperate shouting at the world. I think it's possible for us to learn to appreciate this.
I recently read, let me grab that. I read an essay by Susan Sontag, "Notes on Camp," and it really made me think of this video. So, camp is like a taste. It's like a certain way of looking at art. Camp loves the artificial, the extravagant. It focuses on style instead of content. It is a love for the exaggerated, the off. So if you are reading on a windowsill with a cigarette touching your lips, mimicking the cover of your copy of Simone de Beauvoir's *The Woman Destroyed*, maybe you're being a little bit performative, but it's also a little camp. According to Sontag, camp understands beings as playing a role. So, it understands the metaphor of life as theater. You know, we're all beings playing a role. But instead of feeling frustration at that, it chooses to just enjoy it. It accepts performance as a part of life and it just enjoys the style and the passion behind it.
The critic lost in the world of poser ethics would hate that guy reading on the windowsill. "You are not a vibe, bro." But if you look at the world with a camp sensibility, I wonder if you might say, "Yes, that person reading on the windowsill with his coffee is kind of playing a role, but they're also excelling at that role. They're kind of slaying at it. They are a vibe, bro." Camp is generous. It wants to enjoy. Camp taste is a kind of love. Love for human nature. It relishes rather than judges the little triumphs and awkward intensities of character. I think you can point this lens towards the performative readers on the internet, or just even life in general, instead of trying to weed out the fakers and seeing yourself as, like, the paragon of authenticity. You accept that we are all at least partially playing a role on the internet and in real life, and you just enjoy the show.
Let's go back to the example that I gave at the start of this video with *All About Love*. This is a genuinely well-thought-out, in-depth book that challenges a lot of the ways that we think about love in our society. Because of that, some people started reading it to appear like someone who has thought-provoking ideas about love. And the book has now become commodified so far that you can buy it in the home decor section of Urban Outfitters as if it is literally a fashion accessory. And now you kind of look like a poser if you read this. But that doesn't change the fact that this book at its core is still a deeply challenging novel. And I think a kind of similar thing has happened to Camus and Dostoevsky and Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, where these genuinely highly esteemed authors are so used for their intellectual currency that anything associated with them starts to seem fake.
Now it is as if everything that is deemed intellectual and high status eventually starts to appear fake to us. Even with reading itself, which is something that is deemed as very intellectual, now tends to garner a lot of suspicion if people see you do it in public, 'cause people are so quick to suspect that you are probably doing it for fake reasons, for inauthentic reasons. I also think it's interesting to see how this attempt to stop people from reading performatively and reading for real reasons is having the opposite effect because people are now afraid of showing their authentic love for reading out of fear of being perceived as performative.
I tried reading on a train, but this image projected itself onto the pages like an unskippable ad. I really like taking my book on the train. It stops me from looking at my phone. But now every time I do it, I am so aware of what I look like and that I look kind of pretentious and fake. It is like a new kind of performance anxiety. Not the fear to perform, but the fear of being perceived as performative. Don't we all sometimes read certain books, wear certain clothes, do certain things just to exude a certain vibe? Are we not allowed to try anymore? Isn't it okay to go through a little fake moment to figure out what we actually like?
If we go back to early 20s, Leonie, that at first started reading because of a genuine love but didn't really get taken seriously 'cause she was reading young adult novels and fantasy and romance. That same Leonie that then got interested in more literary books and philosophy and reading English classics. There was this constant push and pull in my mind between a genuine interest in literature and philosophy, but also chasing that because I knew people would take me a little bit more seriously if I had read those books. There was a push and pull between being performative and being real. It wasn't one or the other. I enjoyed reading *The Myth of Sisyphus*, and I enjoyed being someone who had read *The Myth of Sisyphus*.
And this push and pull goes way beyond books. I think we constantly live in the conflict between doing what we authentically enjoy and what authentically enjoying that thing signals to the world around us. Between wanting to follow our heart's desires and being influenced by what other people think of us. Like listening to the Beatles because it's cool and not associating with One Direction, or getting really into One Direction because you really love being part of the community. Testing the waters at your new workplace to see if they like your weird humor or if maybe you need to tone it down a little. Following fashion trends to fit in, or deliberately going against them. Maybe also because you want to fit in with a counterculture. So much of life's problems and stories about being human boil down to the conflict between wanting to be ourselves and wanting to be liked by others. This is such a universal experience, such a core part of being human that it baffles me that we cannot conceive that other people experience this in the same way as we do. That we cannot assume this complexity in others. That instead, we just assume that another person is completely faking something, completely doing something for the wrong reasons.
I remember about a month ago, I was having breakfast at this cute little outside breakfast place, and there was a guy sitting there alone, and he had this wool jacket and a mustache and these tortoise-shell glasses, and he was sitting there alone, and he was reading this tiny little paperback of some kind of Roman philosopher. And I just knew, "Oh my gosh, that guy must be enjoying himself so much right now. He must think he looks so cool right now." But, you know, also, good for him. Maybe he was probably also just really enjoying his book. I don't know. I haven't spoken to him. Maybe that girl annotating her book genuinely loves engaging with the book in such a hands-on way, and also kind of enjoys the TikTok likes that she gets for it. Maybe that guy reading in the windowsill is a genuine lover of books and enjoys looking cool in his windowsill with his little paperback.
Like I said, when I was 18, I was deeply frustrated that people just assumed I wasn't critically engaging with the books I read just because I was reading young adult books. So, what I'm trying to say is, I think a lot more people are deeply engaging with the books that they read than we think that they are. And I think that if we all just recognize that we are all complex humans that sometimes do things for ingenuine reasons, that sometimes do things just because we want to be liked by others, then we start seeing that when other people are being a little bit fake, it doesn't mean that they are now entirely 100% fake readers doing it for wrong reasons.
And if you are continuing your crusade against the anti-intellectual fake readers, ask yourself, what aspects are you looking for? What image is on the wanted poster? And does that image actually tell you anything? I don't think there's any use in trying to figure out who is performative and who is genuine based on surface-level outside signifiers like what type of book they are reading or what aesthetic they exude. Instead, maybe have a conversation with them. Actually talk to them about books and see what they have to say.
I want to clarify here that I do believe that anti-intellectualism is a real problem, and that we should encourage each other to read critically and engage more with all the media that we just mindlessly consume. But this video just simply isn't about anti-intellectualism. I'm just here focusing on our tendency to divide the world into inauthentic readers and posers, actual critical readers, and people who read in the wrong way. If we want to be critical, then we also need to look at ourselves and our own performativity.
Okay. What I want to hear from you guys in the comments is your best story of a moment that you yourself were being a little bit of a fake reader, or when you read or did something regarding books that was maybe a little ingenuine or a little occupied with wanting to belong somewhere. This was like a little bit of a more rambly, ideas-based video instead of like a researched video essay. I kind of tried to make it a little bit more like a personal essay where I give my own opinions and give some anecdotes about my own life. So, let me know if you enjoyed this format. Also, I think by the time this video has gone up, I've been on a three-week break. This video was pre-filmed. Um, so I just want to say I needed like a month-long break from YouTube video creating. Um, but I will be back in about two weeks with another video. So, don't worry. I think in my next reading wrap-up, I'll do like a little life update, a little catching up, a little chit-chatty thingy. With that, I am going to end this video. I really hope that you enjoyed this video. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day, and I will see you soon in another video very soon. Goodbye. [Music]