(gentle lounge music) - Oh my God, I didn't see you there. (book clacking)
(gentle lounge music) (Mina laughing) (static shrieking) (audio beeping) (gentle lounge music) (typewriter clacking) (typewriter tinging) - I love to read. (gentle atmospheric music) - For fun? - Hey nerds, my name is Mina. I'm a reader. I read, yes. (laughs) But most of the books behind me, actually on the shelf,
I haven't actually read. Most of these books are nonfiction. They're art books and they actually belong to my boyfriend's grandpa who
passed away some years ago. So we inherited a bunch of books that I haven't gotten around to reading. For this video, I wanted
to talk about books because I'm familiar with BookTok. I'm familiar with like
anti-intellectualism discourse and the over-consumption
of books discourse, and I'm also familiar with the
concept of using a book prop as a fashion accessory, especially online. Actually, the recent Skall Studio show during Copenhagen Fashion Week, I'm not sure if you guys saw that, but they featured models
carrying books down the runway. So I'd go so far as to say that hot-girl-ification of reading has taken the fashion industry by storm and is definitely connected with the fact that Bayonetta-style
librarian-esque prescription glasses have also come into vogue. The structure of this video is going to be kinda weird, I guess. I just have a lot of thoughts
about reading and books in today's online digital age. So yeah, let's just hop into it. - 'Cause I'll have to read all this. - Before we get started, I
just wanna bring attention to our sponsor for the video, ThredUp. ThredUp is an online
consignment slash thrift store, and if you have been
following me for a while, you know that I love thrifting,
I love shopping secondhand. I think it's one of the
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and acquire new clothes. And also it's the best way
to find interesting pieces that are so unique and
that no one else has. So I'm really excited
about this partnership, and now, I'm gonna show
you what I got. (chuckles) Okay, the first item I got was this Adam Lippes wool pullover sweater and it's, first of all, super
soft, such great quality. I wasn't familiar with Adam Lippes before, but he's a luxury designer and his prices are so
high on his actual website and you won't believe
that I got this sweater for literally $36. The second item that I got a Marc by Marc Jacobs button-down shirt. I decided to layer it with the
suit set that I already own. I don't know, I think this whole outfit is very like cotton candy office wear and I'm obsessed. (chuckles) I also got this pencil skirt, it's Jil Sander, so that is a major steal, and I actually don't own a pencil skirt, but I really want one. I think I might actually hem
this to be a little bit shorter to give it more of a Fran Drescher,
"The Nanny," kinda vibe. The last thing I have is this Fendi dress and I got it because it reminds me a bit of like a Victorian chemise and I decided to layer it
over a Victorian petticoat and under this contemporary corset. You can also shop my secondhand favorites that I picked out on the website
if you use my link below, and you can also use my code, MINA, for 35% off your first order. (typewriter clattering) I mean it's pretty obvious why books are symbols of intellectualism. Books are used to host
knowledge and research. We all had to read a
number of books for school and the act of reading itself
has actually always been a highly-regarded skill and gate kept from women
in the lower classes for centuries at a time. It's not lost to me how 99.99% of all civil rights activists, feminists and revolutionaries, that's a made-up figure, but it feels like it's a
lot of them, (chuckles) have all emphasized the importance
of the right to education because knowledge is power. So when we see someone
posting their stacks of books or carrying a bookstore tote bag, we'd like to think this
person is actually a reader and not just flexing that they do, I guess, in fact have the ability to read. - I do know how to read though. - But books have also always
been used to signify status, not just personal interests. For example, back in the first century, the Roman philosopher, Seneca,
wrote about his distaste towards people who owned a lot of books but who didn't actually read. He complained that many people
without a school education used books not as tools for study, but as decorations for the dining room. Of the flamboyant
collector, he wrote that, "You can see the complete works of orders and historians on
shelves up to the ceiling, because, like bathrooms, a library has become an essential
ornament of a rich house." For context, private bathrooms used to be like a frivolous luxury because the majority of people
just used public bathhouses. (airplane droning) (static shrieking) (audio beeping) Sociologist, Frank Furedi, adds context to this hater energy in his article, "Bookish Fools." At the time, there was a
sort of public reading mania called the Recitatio, AKA, public literary reading
conducted by authors and poets. And maybe it would've been less annoying if the readings were all good, but many wealthy citizens took advantage of these public opportunities
for self-promotion for their mediocre work. - Julia Rob Hurts. (tambourine clattering) (Maya laughing) (microphone banging) - Naturally, these kinds
of mediocre writers were targets for all sorts of
contempt and sarcastic humor and many actually prominent writers and satirists of the time, like Horace, Petronius,
Persius and Juvenal, absolutely made fun of these people. I'll read a critical excerpt from the Roman satirist, Martial, "You read to me as I stand,
you read to me as I sit. You read to me as I run,
you read to me as I shit. I flee to the baths, you boom in my ear. I head for the pool,
you won't let me swim. I hurry to dinner, you
stop me in my tracks. I arrive at the meal,
your words make me gag." But back to home libraries. The practice of building
out display libraries to showcase material wealth
and cultural prestige continued for hundreds of years later, even still today some might say. So Richard de Bury's essay, "Philobiblon," written in 1345 but published in 1473, is said to be the
earliest English treatise on the delights of literature. But "Philobiblon" says very little about de Bury's actual
experience of reading and that's because his real
interest was collecting books rather than reading them. His biographer, William de Chambre, wrote, in not these words exactly, but essentially, "Damn,
bitch, you live like this?" De Chambre claimed that
books surrounded de Bury in all of his residences and that so many books
lay about his bed chamber that you were barely able to stand or move without stepping on them. By the 16th century,
reading became so en vogue that people wanted to be
immortalized as readers. Paintings of this time period depict subjects devoted to reading or embracing their books, and the effect it has on the
viewer is strong still today. For example, even if we don't
know who Dante Alighieri is, when we look at the painting, "Allegorical Portrait of
Dante," by Agnolotti Bronzino, seeing Dante with such a
large edition of "Paradiso" tells us that this man is a
culturally accomplished man. He's not even reading
the book in the painting. It's like one of the most obvious examples of just using a book as a prop to say something larger about that person. Reading became way more accessible throughout the 18th century, so the elite now had
to figure out new ways to separate themselves from the
poor within this book space. And that's when we got the literary critic who separated the good readers, the elite, from the bad readers, the poor. Edith Wharton wrote in her 1903 essay, "The Vice of Reading," "To read is not a virtue,
but to read well is an art and an art that only the
born reader can acquire." And she later goes on to say
that the mechanical reader lacked innate aptitude
and the gift of reading and could never acquire the art. Virginia Woolf wrote in her
1925 essay, "The Common Reader," that the average reader was hasty, inaccurate and superficial. And, of course, his
deficiencies as a critic are too obvious to be pointed out. This is really tricky because I do think there is such a thing as
good writing and bad writing and some books are more challenging and smarter, I guess, than other books. And a lot of what makes someone a good writer or a good reader does come from access to
education which costs money. So there is like this subtle link between being a good reader and having a certain
privileged kind of upbringing. But obviously, I think there
are way less barriers now than there were in the
18th and 19th centuries. For example, K through
12 education is mandated and the internet and
libraries have a plethora of accessible resources. At the same time, I
think anti-intellectuals use this historical positioning
of reading equals money to justify being ignorant. I don't know if this is still necessarily a prominent group of people anymore, but I do remember when I was
on Twitter a couple years ago, people would get attacked all the time and they were called classist
for just using big words. And in these cases, I
don't think it's classist because if you have access to
Twitter in the first place, you probably have access
to an online dictionary where you could look up that word. Not to get even more in the weeds of this, but I do think that sometimes, people use a large vocabulary
to flex on other people. And I definitely get that, not trying to say that
these people don't exist, but maybe rather than
trying to be pretentious for the sake of it, a person
could be using big vocabulary because they actually are
genuinely interested in vocabulary and are just trying to get
words to stick in their brains by using them more often in daily life. I don't know, it really
depends on the person, but I think that on the internet, we have a tendency to just
assume the worst in everyone. I actually saw a lot of
this kind of rhetoric targeted towards the
dark academia subculture because of its affinity to
glamorize academic education. Dark academia places a heavy
emphasis on reading, writing and humanities degrees with people of this internet subculture, taking photos of old libraries, vintage leather satchels full
of books and poetry verses. It's part preppy academia and part gothic and it appealed to me
a lot during 2018-ish because I was in college at the time and I needed to romanticize how much I didn't like being in college. I never dressed as dark academia because I didn't love the associated brown-toned tweed style, but my Tumblr account at the time was full of like dark academia imagery, which is actually very funny because I was very heavily invested into like street wear at this time. So I had like flaming yellow hair and I don't look like the type of person that would've had a dark
academia Tumblr blog, but alas, I'm a woman of
multitudes. (chuckles) Anyway, what's interesting to me is that most of the
people in the community were not studying in
traditional elitist institutions like Harvard and Oxford and
Ivy League universities. They were people who, I
think, just genuinely loved to read classic books. But yet, there was still a romanticization of these specific universities and the upper class upbringing associated with students
who attended them. All of this is to say
that with all the elitism associated with books, it's therefore unsurprising
then that celebrities love to take pictures of themselves reading. Not to shade Marc Jacobs in any way. - No shade. (audience shrieking) No, no, no shade. - [Mina] But just as an example, he once uploaded a picture
of himself on Instagram reading the collected
stories of Cookie Mueller and "British Vogue"
actually reported on it. They said, "As much as the designer is making an innocent recommendation, he is also broadcasting his participation in niche book culture." I'm sure Mr. Jacobs actually
reads the books he posts 'cause he posts a lot of books and I'm not trying to imply otherwise. What I think is interesting
though is the choice of book he chooses to post. Similarly, Kendall Jenner
was popped on a yacht with Chelsea Hodson's
"Tonight I'm Someone Else" and Gigi Hadid was photographed with Albert Camus's "The Stranger" during Milan Fashion Week. Once again, not saying that these people didn't actually read these books, nor am I saying that these people have like secretly bad tastes
that they're not revealing. But I do think it's
interesting, in a general sense, that celebrities are
rarely ever photographed reading culturally like unglamorous books, like grocery store romances
or self-help books, and maybe it's because certain books have sort of integrated
themselves into the fashion space. It was Vivienne Westwood who once said, "A status symbol is a book. A very easy book to read is
'The Catcher in the Rye.' Walk around with that under
your arm, kids. That is status." And to this point, Daniel Rogers
writes for "British Vogue" the necessary extra
element of looking stylish along with your book to get
this kind of status cred. He writes, "Of course, this only works if you have committed yourself
to both books and looks. A well-dressed nerd is not the
same as a poorly-dressed one, and this has proved a powerful combination in mainstream media." On "Gossip Girl" and "White Lotus," well-heeled scions and pretentious teens tote Eve Babitz and Nietzsche and Elena Ferrante as though
they were Fendi Baguettes. And as "The New York
Times" recently uncovered, some celebrities
intentionally set up photo ops to show off the latest it book, handpicked by a celebrity book stylist. I kinda wish I had that job,
not gonna lie. (chuckles) While there's other mediums to showcase your own elite taste, the unique value of a book is that it just looks
really good in photos. I'll read a quote from the coldhealing Substack
essay, "Book-Objects." "You can take a picture of yourself with a frame of the movie you're
watching in the background or post a Spotify screenshot of a song you're listening to
alongside a landscape picture. But because a book object
is a more natural bridge between physical space
and the realm of art, it comes across more naturally in photos." The book is also extremely portable. You can take it to a coffee shop, a beach, a hotel room, a bathtub. In these situations, books can be used to also showcase the equally
important environment you're reading in. It's all about the collection of objects that all work together in one image. The coldhealing Substack
writer is anonymous, so I don't know their name, but they called these
curated photos of books within physical spaces as reading scenes. As an example, they write, "When a 16-year-old girl takes
a picture of 'The Bell Jar,' the edition with the rose, next to her coffee on the glass table on her parents' balcony on a cloudy day, she's creating a reading scene, permanently capturing
her moment of reading and also saying that
this is how she reads. And because it's how she reads and because she's touching
the realm of ideas that the book contains, she's
saying, 'This is who I am.'" The desire to telegraph this
sort of cultural capital is so widespread and because of social media where everyone has the
capacity to be an influencer, the power of book messaging affects people outside the celebrity circuit as well. There's even a trend on TikTok of people creating fake
Tom Ford coffee table books because of the status associated with said coffee table books. The way that the TikTok algorithm works, AKA, you could blow up at any time and you could even have a viral video with like 200 followers. The medium of TikTok influences everyone to view themselves as a brand which encourages people into
putting more of an effort into curating their home spaces to convey a certain look to guests or even just to coworkers
on a Zoom meeting. Interior designer, Nina
Freudenberger, said, "Books are the most important
accessory in the house. Books show someone's true
interests or their values or what they want their legacy to be. They answer the questions,
'Who is this person or who do they want other
people to think they are?'" Ashley Tisdale actually raised
a bit of internet controversy following her "Architectural Digest" tour when she admitted that the
bookshelves had been staged. - I had my husband go to a bookstore and I was like, "You
need to get 400 books." - [Mina] But Ashley is
far from the only person who's worked with a library curator. There are specialists on the
market, like On Clarendon Road, who make it a profession
to curate home libraries, yachts and hotels. But, of course, there's many
ways to display one's books. The new trend that I've seen is the interior design aesthetic dubbed bookshelf wealth on TikTok potentially as backlash towards the overly curated libraries. The point of bookshelf wealth is to display an eclectic
collection of books that the owner has actually read. The overall look is supposed
to suggest authenticity. You've been collecting books
and art over the years, not just putting out items as props to achieve a certain look. Hence why there are seemingly
random piles of them just about everywhere, like you didn't plan to
have this many books, but you can't help it as a highbrow renaissance woman. Of course, the critics say that this is not any more
authentic at the end of the day. But all of this is to say that
print books have meanings. This is probably why that
while there was a scare when Kindles were first introduced that they would overtake physical books, these E-readers never
did usurp the market. Digital texts do not serve as
markers for cultural capital or for cultural distinction, and that's because what
you're seen reading is probably more important than the act of reading
itself, sadly. (chuckles) (gentle atmospheric music) (typewriter clacking) Given this love affair for physical books, it's also not surprising that print books have
made a major comeback since pre-pandemic times. - These are my books. I couldn't bring them all
because it got you heavy. - [Mina] In 2020, publishers sold nearly 60 million more print
books than the year before possibly because people
were stuck at home. But what's interesting is that the numbers have kept going up even in
2021 hitting a new record. Sales have dipped a little recently, but they still remain
12% above 2019 levels. This phenomenon isn't
confined to the United States. In other parts of the world as well, readers love the feel of
turning pages in their hands, the World Economic Forum reported. In a 2019 essay for "The Guardian," Bethany Patch argued that
the book industry isn't dead. That's just an excuse
to keep salaries low. Top editor, Katy Loftus, left the publishing industry in 2022 citing the mental health
strain telling the bookseller, "At the same time as working
hours have increased, the pressure has too. This is, I believe, at least partly because financial targets are becoming more and more the focal point of the publisher's everyday despite publishing being of its nature extremely unpredictable and despite record profits being made." So yeah, despite sales,
careers in publishing are more precarious than ever. So naturally, new authors have started to use any platform available to them to advertise their writing. I mean, authors have always
held some responsibility when it comes to promoting their own work. This isn't like an inherently new thing. They've engaged in public readings, book signing events, et cetera. But in recent years, what's
new is that some authors have taken on the roles of influencer and creative director as well. In October, "Nylon" published a piece on the so-called literary it girl detailing the inventive new ways that many young female writers are marketing their work and themselves. For example, Ottessa Moshfegh walked in Maryam Nassir
Zadeh's fall 2022 runway show. Allie Rowbottom's book
launch party for "Aesthetica" was covered by downtown
photographer, Cobrasnake, and had a Botox booth, and Claudia Dey partnered
with Universal Flowering to release a custom perfume
for her book, "Daughter." Author, Madeline Cash,
said in the article, "Writers have to advocate for
themselves like never before. You can't be the hermetic enigmatic Salinger Pynchon type anymore. You have to sell yourself. I taught at Sarah Lawrence recently and the kids were like, 'How
do you become a writer?' And I was like, 'Have
generational wealth.' If you don't have rich parents, being a writer is one part
talent and two parts networking. Being a writer in 2023 is also being an agent and editor and PR girl." The "Nylon" article sparked discourse around literary it girls
featuring a lot of pretty harsh and frankly misogynistic criticism
of the writers discussed. But playwright, Alison K Williams, defended these girls, writing, "I've done a lot of events in my life and there are quite a
few clues in the article that the writers are leveraging friends much more than spending cash. These writers identified their readers and created moments that
got these readers excited. Yeah, there's privilege at work, but not an unattainable level." Rowbottom, who was discussed
in the "Nylon" piece, wrote her own response in "Byline." She goes into further detail
about her past experience marketing her debut novel
through traditional channels and how that drove her to try something new with her next book. "In the end, sales fell in line, disappointing, as they often are, when a book is marketed
as something it's not to an audience ill-suited
to its questions. That was years ago now, years in which I've written and published
a novel, 'Aesthetica,' for which I chose my own author photo and took an active hand in
every element of production, from the Publishers
Marketplace announcement to the jacket copy to the publicity. I'm not ashamed that
I've thought carefully about my ideal readers
and how to reach them, nor am I ashamed to have
done everything I can to promote my book essentially to a world of readers
addicted to their phones." She also brings up Walt Whitman who had his own penchant
for self-promotion and the double standard placed
on women who do the same. My personal take is that I do think there's a certain privilege
of being a literary it girl because the overwhelming majority of them seem to be pretty white thin girls who live in New York City
or other metropolitan areas which come with their own high costs of living and inaccessibility. But I don't think that
these women are the problem. I think it's just like a bad system developing into a different bad system and people in it are just trying to thrive in any way they can using whatever tools they're
fortunate enough to have. Like I can't hate against that, but I think we can address the
inequality that still exists. The impact of this new
way of marketing though is that books become integrated
into people's identities. By doing the work to attach their books with specific designers or certain sense, writers are more than
ever helping to curate a niche identity for their reader base. Sometimes, readers will
already do that on their own, like with how many coquette
girls adopted Sylvia Plath and "The Virgin Suicides"
into their aesthetic. But with new releases, it's
becoming a marketing technique for the writer to help out in aestheticizing their books as well. BookTok is another area
of marketing potential and is actually how Colleen Hoover, arguably the most successful female author of this moment in time, got her success. Hoover is a polarizing figure. - What got me back into reading, what made me fall in
love with Colleen Hoover. - I would like to fist
fight Colleen Hoover in a Wendy's parking lot. - I have read almost every single book written by Colleen Hoover. - I have read all of her books. - I love her. - I am a Colleen Hoover hater
first and a person second. - It made me homicidal. - It's had all these
stories I wanted to tell. - We both laugh at our son's big balls. (static screeching) - Transparency, I haven't read any of her books, but people I know online
do tend to make fun of them for just about like every reason, from the character names,
to their writing styles, to the kinda plot points
that tend to emerge, and yet, Colleen Hoover is so successful because you don't have to
be well liked by critics to be well liked by the public. And well liked she is. In 2022 alone, Hoover's book
sold 14.3 million copies, and in total, more than
24 million copies to date. "TIME Magazine" named Hoover one of the most
influential people of 2023. Her fans on TikTok, known
as the CoHos, (chuckles) make content like book
reviews, reading vlogs and analyses of her novels. Edel Flood, head of lifestyle
education for TikTok UK, explains the appeal of BookTok. content on TikTok tends
to be more authentic. You don't need any
video editing experience or a big following. It's more like getting a book
recommendation from a friend. BookTok also sometimes operates
like a digital book club where people all read the
same books and discuss them. I'm a little plugged into BookTok, I'm not like fully in the realm of it because I also follow and
make other types of content, but I do have friends who are deeply entrenched
in the BookTok community and like I do watch a good
number of BookTok videos, okay? I don't know why I have to, I watch them. But even though I watch a lot of BookTok, I don't refer to BookTok as like a whole for recommendations because I feel like like my
taste in books is very specific and I've been led astray many times trying to follow someone else's taste. For example, I did not love "The Seven Deaths" of Evelyn Hugo, I didn't like "The Silent Patient," I didn't like "The Paris Apartment." I don't like actually a lot of books that I've seen get really popular and so yeah, now, I just like
listen to very specific people or my friends who I
feel like know my taste and are able to like recommend books based on like what they know that I like. But to give you an idea
of how much BookTok is actually impacting the industry, NPD BookScan says that readers
purchased 825 million copies of print books in the US in 2021, which was the bestselling
year for print books, since the company began
tracking data in 2004. And analysts believe young people posting about books on social
media played a serious role in those big numbers. In the end, BookTok is impacting the way publishers find authors. Instead of finding good material
and building an author up with the PR power of the publishing house, editors are now looking for
writers with a following already who can guarantee at least a
chunk of sales from the start. That kind of equation used to only exist when celebrities decided
to publish memoirs. Branding is important, obviously. As we've already talked about, different books carry different meanings. It's way more chic to be
reading "The Stranger" than it is to be reading
"The Viscount Who Loved Me" even if there's nothing inherently wrong with reading the latter book. And part of what determines these meanings is built into the book's branding. This is why some readers
criticize Elena Ferrante's books for their cover design. Elena Ferrante is a female author or at least a female pen name, no one knows her real identity. But her books follow women in their lives and the covers feature like airy photos of women and toddlers. The cover of "My Brilliant Friend" shows a cupcake-like bride and "Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay" has a barefoot woman in a sundress carrying a toddler on a beach. This has culminated in discourse around and reading her books in public with some fans claiming
that it's embarrassing because a casual observer
might mistake them for reading like grocery
store romance chick lit when actually, Ferrante's
work is pretty highly regarded as like serious literature. - It's just nothing like
what you would expect from just looking at
these horrible covers. Just nothing like that.
Really, really bad covers. - Okay, by the way, I use this term like term serious literature because I feel like it's so (fingers clicking) subjective what serious literature is. I'm not trying to knock the fact that Elena Ferrante books
are good literature. I'm just like poking fun at the concept of serious literature to begin with. Does that make sense? So "Slate" conducted an interview with the cover designer
for the Neapolitan trilogy asking her, "Have you communicated with Elena Ferrante about the covers? Do you know she likes them?" And the designer replied, "Yes, we showed Elena the
covers and she approved them. She trusts us and has faith in our work and she doesn't intervene much
in these kinds of choices, though she does share her impressions. She agreed with our choice to
purposely use low-class images and she was surprised by the doubts expressed by some readers. We also had the feeling that
many people didn't understand the game we were playing, that of, let's say, dressing
an extremely refined story with a touch of vulgarity." People have also criticized the way that trashy romances have
been marketed as a whole. Traditionally, the difference between steamy romance novel covers and the covers for young adult fiction used to be pretty stark. You would get the
airbrushed shirtless Fabio on books like "The Viscount Who Loved Me," while simple illustrations
were on "A Wrinkle in Time," "Harry Potter," and "The Hunger Games." But today, trashy romances are now getting cutesy
illustration rebrands that make them look like
young adult fiction. And some consumers are confused and upset by two genres merging into one, and I agree. To be quite frank, I am kind of annoyed by the category of women's
literature to begin with because I'm like, "What
does that even mean? Like why is like men's
literature just literature and then women's literature
like its own separate thing?" I don't know. With saying that, I definitely don't think that women's literature and young adult literature
should be conflated either because then it lends itself to this idea that women are immature and
write and read childish books, which implies the flip side, which is like men write
and read serious books, they read real adult literature. And my problem with it is just like this has been a harmful rhetoric
present throughout history. (typewriter clacking) (harp strumming) Charlemagne formally introduced
literacy to European girls in the eighth century by decreeing that all
churches in his kingdom should have schools for girls and boys. He also introduced more books
in the common vernacular rather than in proper Latin, which only boys were
trained to read at the time. The mass availability
of books in vernacular meant that more girls were able to read. However, men being men, scorned vernacular literature claiming that these books were overly sentimental and realistic and there was too much love of friendship, animals and magic potions, which
sounds like an amazing time and I don't know why they weren't into it. - I hate men. - Another criticism
towards women's literature is aimed less at the content and more at the idea of
women reading period. Joan Acocella wrote for "The New Yorker." "A big worry was that reading was something women could do alone without anyone to guide their thinking. They would thus learn
to think independently." The horror. (chuckles) Though certain literature
has been accessible to generally upper class
women throughout history, marketing of books directly to middle and
working class women audiences really took off in the US
in the mid 19th century with the introduction of the dime novel. Due to the dime novel's low price and its widespread availability, these books were pretty formulaic and aimed at working class audiences and therefore developed a
reputation as degraded literature. While there were dime
novels marketed to men, it was mostly women who read them and this is because most
urban working class women were laboring in factories where hours were long
and conditions were poor, and these novels allowed
them a sense of escapism and gave them things to talk
about with their coworkers. Some authors were upset
about this development, believing that the
degradation AK, feminization, of literature was impacting
the success and prestige of their own work. For example, Nathaniel Hawthorne said, "America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is
occupied with their trash and should be ashamed of
myself if I did succeed. (mouth clicking) Other critics thought women's dime novels, which typically centered
on romance and marriage, represented a nation in moral decline as it would encourage working class women to adopt the sensibilities of
middle and upper class women. Edward G. Salmon wrote in his
1886 essay, "What Girls Read," "Let us go into the houses of the poor and try to discover what is the effect on the maiden mind of the
trash which maidens buy. We should probably find
that the high-flown conceits and pretensions of the
poor girls of the period, their dislike of manual
work and love of freedom spring largely from notions
imbibed in the course of a perusal of their penny fictions." But regardless of the
book's actual content, there's something subversive
about women reading, independent thought. Joanna Thomas-Corr wrote
for "The Guardian," "There's something about
the female bookworm, face obscured by a novel,
hidden within plain sight, possibly pondering the
bigger questions of life, possibly fantasizing that
can serve as an affront. The onus has long been on women to facilitate easy human relations, and lone reading is an occupation that is not compatible
with the social self." I feel like the most recent
scandalist development in women's literature
was the bodice ripper, which is a romance sub-genre that was introduced in the 1970s, notably with Kathleen E. Woodiwiss's "The Flame and the
Flower," published in 1972. The 1970s and '80s was the
peak of trashy romance novels, and the publisher,
Harlequin Books Limited, now Harlequin Enterprises, was highly influential in
the sub-genre development. But back to "The Flame and the Flower." Before this book,
mass-marketed romance novels featured very little
sexually explicit material, but this flashy new
genre, the bodice ripper, featured beautiful virginal, yet fierce and independent women who would catch the eye
of a handsome alpha male who would attempt to
seduce and dominate her, definitely the precursor
for "Fifty Shades of Grey," but usually in a historical landscape. The landscape of how we
publish and consume literature has changed though, and now, most readers
consume racy romance fiction with the discretion of E-readers. I honestly wonder if the increased shame around trashy romantic print books is why we're seeing a spike in romance books getting marketed with the cute cartoony
covers I mentioned earlier, rather than with the
traditional sexy covers of couples embracing. But all in all, the through line connecting these three time
periods of women's literature seems to be the subject of romance. Nora Roberts, one of the most
popular romance novelists of the 1980s and '90s once said, "All genres are scorned by literary types, but none more so than romance. But then it's a genre
written by women for women, unless a guy writes one and
they call it something else and it gets reviewed
and made into a movie. A woman writes it and
it's just one of those." Not all women's literature is romantic. The romance themes sometimes surface because these books, at their core, center female interiority, female pleasure, female aspiration, and that's honestly like the real reason why these books are
disparaged by male critics because men will read
a book written by a man that has some romance in it. But yeah, I think the problem really is that they set these books center women. I should point out women and
girls consistently read more and read fiction far
more than men and boys, so they've increasingly been recognized as a primary market for publishers. In the UK, the readers
of the top-selling books across the board were
54% female and 46% male. However, for the top 10 bestselling female authors, only 19% of their readers
are men and 81% are women. But for the top 10
bestselling male authors, the split is almost even,
55% men and 45% women. This obviously affects women
writers in the type of stories that get funded and published. Siri Hustvedt raised the concern that this disparity could
lead the medium of literature into becoming, in the eyes of culture, a highly feminized form. As the concept of the novel
itself becomes feminized, it runs the risk of being dismissed. There's a danger that
the novel gets dismissed as a feminized form, especially since the history of the novel from its 18th century origins
was rooted in the idea of it as frivolous literature for leisured women who didn't receive a formal education in science or politics. It was male writers, such
as Samuel Richardson, as well as a generation of male critics, who were seen to
professionalize fiction writing, which is perhaps why many
women feel suspicious that the where are all
the men conversation too often goes hand in
hand with the question, is the novel dead? Thus not really surprising that BookTok is overwhelmingly composed of women creators and audiences. So the main criticisms I've seen towards the BookTok community
is that some people, some people, will gate keep books, tout
unachievable reading habits, promote over consumption, and then, of course, there's
all kinds of phantom drama that can spring up too. There's also this pressure
to read the same books as everyone else in the community, especially if you're a small creator trying to make a name for yourself. All this is to say that BookTok
can feel very monolithic, especially with the general
bias towards fantasy, dark romance, young adult
fiction and wellness books. But who's setting the precedent
for these kinda trends? TikTok is a visual medium, and naturally, white,
cis, thin, richer people are able to rise more quickly than other groups across the board. Deanna Schwartz and Megan
Collins Sullivan wrote for NPR, "The majority of the most successful BookTok romance novels are about white straight
characters and by white authors with few notable exceptions. The books that go viral on TikTok tend to be by white authors
and mostly white women." And this ends up having
ramifications outside of BookTok and not just because you
should be reading like a diverse number of stories
just because that is better for our own personal developments, but just like within the industry itself, there are so many books
that I think are excellent and don't make a bestsellers list, and so many of these books are
written by non-white authors. There's definitely a pattern and a marked disadvantage
that authors of color have to face in publishing. Of course, at the end of the day, much of this stems from
people needing to cash in with the least amount of effort possible. Books that are similar to other recently successful
books get more funding and so it just feeds into this
like negative feedback cycle where the same stories get
published over and over again. Joanna Thomas-Corr talked to 4th Estate editorial
director, Kishani Widyaratna, about the Sally Rooney phenomenon in which every publisher rushed
to find young female writers to fill the Rooney-shaped hole. This mode of thinking leads to the reproduction of
something that already exists, which contributes to these
kinds of formulaic books that utilize all the same plot devices and writing conventions. The TikTok algorithm itself regurgitates this line of thinking because it'll just
generate similar content that you already like, preventing diversity or variation in both what people are seeing and what people are making
because money is in the views, and as a digital creator, the
way to maximize those views is by regurgitating what
the algorithm wants. Faith Young of Hell Yeah
Books said in an interview, "At the beginning, when you first join, there are definitely six to 10 books that everyone speaks about." Also, this is not just something
that is related to BookTok, it's just like across the board for like all of TikTok, all of YouTube, all of social media to begin with. People just like end up having
to make content, me included, of what the algorithm wants, AK, what so many other
people are talking about. Even though I love to talk about all these other kinda niche things, I have to like decide how to space them out throughout the year because if I was just
doing like niche topics, I wouldn't be making
enough money to do this as a full-time career. The other moral argument is
that the popular BookTok books tend to feature, copy, paste, not like the other girls
type of generic protagonist or characters who are
purposely mean and unlikable like Moshfegh's protagonist, and that by consuming only
these sort of narratives will encourage young girls to be more like these
characters. (chuckles) My two cents about that is I
don't think it's necessarily a bad thing to write or read
about unlikable characters, and, you know, similar, this is the argument that's
used against Hoover as well because she gets a lot of flack for portraying abuse and
violence in her stories, which, once again, I don't think is a
necessarily a bad thing. I don't believe that
writing about something is automatically en
endorsement of that thing. And I also don't believe
that reading something means that you will automatically
internalize said thing. But I do get where the worries come because when I take a step back from just like the act of
reading a book itself, I'm like, "Yeah, this is not a great environment (chuckles) to be reading books because the way that
we've aestheticized books through online spaces and the way that we've
integrated certain books into our own identities
can be really worrisome." Someone posted on TikTok a bit ago the coquette bookshelf
at their Barnes & Noble, and the idea, I guess,
was that the booksellers wanted to curate some books that they think coquette girls would like. But what everyone pointed
out in the replies is that most of these books have violent and traumatic subject matter, and why would someone who likes bows want to be associated with these books? To give context, the coquette subculture is a pretty polarizing one
with some of the girls in it just liking cutesy girl aesthetic things and some of the other girls in it actually romanticizing abuse. And I think that divide
led this bookseller to be confused, unfortunately. Similarly, I saw a TikTok
discussion the other day of discourse on how to categorize Lana Del Rey's early aesthetic. Like people were saying, "Is she coquette or is she vintage Americana
or is she dollette or is vintage Americana
a subset of coquette?" And, you know, like at this point, I think we've just lost the plot because I don't think in
2012 when Lana Del Rey was emerging into the mainstream that she thought about
these very limited terms in how to style and market herself. Like I'm pretty sure she just
like had certain references that she liked and, you know, that was it. But all this like
aesthetic categorization, aestheticization, makes
it seem like no one has an actual personality anymore and people just do things
to appear a certain way. So as an example, just staying on the coquette train of thought, if you dress coquette but saw
this Barnes & Noble bookshelf and you picked out "Lolita"
from this bookshelf and you didn't actually like the book, would you admit that you didn't like it or would you assume that you didn't get it because the rest of your friends
in this community liked it? Or would you pretend to like
it so that it doesn't interfere with your own personal branding? Or maybe you didn't wanna read it and you pretended you did just to fit in. Like there's so many parts
of this now that have emerged because books are so tied to like people's aesthetic brand identity. And then on the other side of it, people's Instagram feeds
are so highly curated that a lot of us have
internalized the idea that things posted online
are fake to begin with. Like we just assume they're fake. So when someone posts a
photo of them reading, especially if it's a
celebrity or an influencer with no public history of being a reader, we're so quick to assume
that they didn't actually read that book they posed with. Back to the Kendall Jenner example, I remember seeing so
much online discourse, people being like, "Kendall Jenner did not read this book" because, I guess, like her
brand identity isn't correlated with reading these types of books. I don't know. And then with all the
discourse about Gen Alpha not knowing how to read and seeing people on public
transit looking at their phones instead of looking at books, it also starts to feel
like the common person doesn't know how to actually read and critically think anymore either. (typewriter clattering) Okay, in conclusion, I have no idea what this
entire video was about. I just kinda wanted to talk about different like book
things that I've been seeing. Like as I said, there's just been a lot of like book emergence
within the fashion space. I've been seeing like a lot
of downtown New York girls promoting reading and doing
like book-related events and hosting like very splashy book events. I've been seeing books in association with different subcultures and different aesthetics. I wanted to evaluate like
what the book object is today and how it's changed over time because, you know, books
have been around for a while. Anyways, I do wanna say
at the end of the day, I am pro BookTok and I am pro aestheticizing books, which I know might be a hot take. Of course, there are problems
like I mentioned earlier, but I think it's all
around really exciting that people are talking about books more and that this is all much
better than the alternative, which, I guess, would be people thinking that books are stupid and not aesthetic and like it's embarrassing
to be seen reading, like that's so much worse
than what we have now. Yeah, I just wanted to raise some points and consider like the
kinds of books that we read and how we have like a lot more agency in deciding like what books we're reading. There's so many books out there that exist beyond like the sphere
of influence of TikTok and of Instagram and et cetera, but. (typewriter clattering) Okay, we have made it to the book recommendation
portion of the video. I just have four books
that I wanna talk about because this video has
gone so long already. The first book I wanna recommend is "Of Human Bondage" by Somerset Maugham. This book is supposedly his masterpiece. I can't really speak on that because I haven't read his other books, but I do have "The
Razor's Edge" in my queue and I have seen "The Painted Veil" movie with Edward Norton and Naomi Watts, but I haven't read the book. (chuckles) "Of Human Bondage" is an
orphan story, I love those. It was written in 1915,
so it's a ye-olde orphan and his name is Philip and we follow Philip throughout the course of like his life from
childhood into adulthood. It's also weird in the
sense that like Philip is so deeply unlikable in
some parts of the book, but by the end, I didn't
wanna say goodbye to him, like I felt something really
deep for this character. I also think that Maugham's
writing style is gorgeous but also very palatable and so it's an easy story to read despite the fact that
it's like over 600 pages, it really flies by. But yeah, I don't know.
I love this book so much. I kinda wanna reread it. I just like love like a
life saga slice of life like dead life kinda story. Also really love "A
Tree Grows in Brooklyn," which is another book
of this genre I'd say. Another recommendation I have is "Kindred" by Octavia Butler. "Kindred" is so good, it's
a time-traveling story. It's about a Black woman
of the modern time. I think the book was
written like in the 1970s, so she's a woman of the 1970s and she gets abruptly like
time traveled back in time to the Antebellum South where she meets and tries
to save the white son of a plantation owner named Rufus. I don't wanna give too much away because there are like
some crazy plot points that get revealed throughout
the course of the book, but it is a fantastic story, really brutal, obviously
because of the subject matter, it's emotionally gut-wrenching and it poses a lot of like
what if questions about race that I think Octavia Butler is able to ask with a lot of care and understanding. "Notes on an Execution" by Danya Kukafka. It follows a serial killer
who's been on death row and it takes place like the hours leading
up to his execution. But it's not just told through
his like point of view, it also like switches off between multiple different
people's points of views, people who have been affected
by this person's violence, and we also get a point
of view from his mother, her life before conceiving him. It's just a great and empathetic book. I think Danya's able to remove judgment and remove like this
idea of trying to push a certain political agenda and she's just trying to
give like the most full and complete understanding of all the people involved in this story, and it's definitely difficult to do, but she does such a good
job, it's such a good book. The last book I have on recommendation is "Ex-Wife" by Ursula Parrott. This book was written in 1929. It's very "Sex and the City" coded. It's like about a young
woman who just got divorced and sort of like her romantic
rendezvous and her friendships and her life living in New York City. It's actually very modern
in terms of its themes despite being like a time capsule. Her attitudes like towards men and towards like female
friendships and stuff, like it's surprisingly
modern and relatable and I really enjoyed reading it. It's a very glamorous story and they actually adapted it into a movie called "The Divorcee" in
1930 starring Norma Shearer. But honestly, the book is so
much better than the movie. So yeah, I highly
recommend checking it out, especially if you're
a fan of the Jazz Age. Okay, this is all I have for today. Thank you so much for listening to me talk about this for so long. You can leave in the comments any book recommendations you have for me or for just like general
book recommendations for anyone who is looking at the comments. Also, thank you to our sponsor ThredUp. Once again, you can shop
my secondhand favorites with the link below and
you can use my code, MINA, for 35% off your first order. Okay, thanks. See ya. (lips clicking) (typewriter clattering)
