#I have so many half-formed Opinions on what insta and esp tiktok seem to have done to our aesthetic tastes and especially what we consider

[ruegracieuse]

browsing a library (I don't have bookstore money! i do love to just browse a bookstore but i can't impulse buy a 20 dollar book rip i respect and admire those who do though) and reading pages at random is SO much fun. i have a lot of sympathy for people who struggle to read bc of disability issues because i also have that struggle but ITA that if you can read the Best of TikTok you can read anything!

[cont.] tacking onto this - i'm not immune to materialism and sigh over book "shelfies" full of gorgeous and often LE covers of social media popular books but there is something so sterile about well-organized bookshelves with perfectly chosen knickknacks populated solely by gorgeous, popular hardcover editions. i try to buy beautiful editions of books i love but inevitably if you love books you'll have some ugly books bc they didn't get a fancy cover or you haven't bought one or you cleaned out a 50 cent book sale.

First of all you're so right about libraries - I should've been more inclusive and mentioned them as well! Where I grew up our libraries were just okay but our secondhand bookshops were so great (we actually didn't have any full-price bookstores in town until I was well into high school) so I always underestimate the average price of shopping for books (and have been sorely hit by this since living in various big cities with big new bookstores). But everyone should support their libraries and you can definitely have the same (honestly, better) browsing experience in a library!

And speaking of inclusivity - I also deeply sympathise with people with disability or who for any reason struggle with reading. I actually read a really interesting post right after reblogging that bookshelf post talking about people who can't read a lot due to disability, and how alienating it can be when their experiences are used as an excuse for not reading in general, and not reading widely. It's not my place to comment on that, but definitely an interesting perspective.

I 100% agree with you - if you can read the best of tiktok, you can definitely read a book you've taken some time to discover yourself, in a library or at a store or by browsing a friend's bookshelf or even by enjoying a film that was based on it, or however else. These are such organic ways to discover a book that you're so much more likely to enjoy, that are going to resonate with you on a personal level, rather than through booktok or bookstagram or some other hashtag-driven social media niche that is designed to church as many people as possible through buying and reading and posting about the book and buying whatever else this publisher/author/influencer releases next. There's a post going around about the 'sigma grindset' approach to reading and I think it absolutely applies here, it's about consuming rather than experiencing or enjoying or being genuinely challenged or moved by a book. Really enjoying a piece of art (including nonfiction here because there's an art to it) takes time, and it doesn't necessarily leave you with an intense desire to go out and read/watch/see/consume something just like it right away. It sits with you. So while it's not antithetical to capitalism in that most people pay to read books or watch films or otherwise see art, it doesn't actively encourage and hasten the endless expenditure of money and social media attention and hype. I'm not saying that publishing companies that look after literary fiction or non-tiktok books aren't profit-driven world-swallowing monsters themselves, but there's a very specific flavour to this influencer-driven reading culture, which is all about getting you to spend money on what is usually pretty mediocre art. Boring ideas done boringly. It's like netflix, you're paying for 95% churned-out content most people would never want to watch without a gun to your head and maybe 5% of things you'll get something out of.

And all this is to say that I can absolutely also fall for pretty 'shelfies' (and, although it's a little unrelated, pretty study images - I'm such a sucker for that) and I am in general very fascinated by how people decorate themselves and their spaces and especially how they store and present their books. But recently even the trends around bookshelf pictures have become very flat and bland to me - everyone seems to have their books colour-coordinated in a hyper-curated spectrum, new white shelves, maybe one or two little plants... I like the pictures that show a little personality, and to have personality you may need to buy.... an ugly book (horror). If I actually walked into someone's house and they had the rainbow bookshelf out there I think I really would become the Goofy Damn Bitch You Live Like This? meme. I'm afraid if you really want to enjoy reading you must submit yourself to the mortifying ordeal of buying a secondhand 1992 copy of a book with the movie poster for the cover, or with the thick plastic cover on it because you got it from a library cleanout sale, or with a weird stock image or just a bland white and cracked spine. My local uni growing up does a huge sale of all the books they cleaned out from all their libraries once a year and they arealways such a great mix of old classics for really cheap with great weird old covers and theory/textbooks on geology and natural history illustration (two things the uni was famous for). They were so much fun, and the thought that you wouldn't go to something like that or the Lifeline Book Fair (or equivalent) or the library or a secondhand bookshop because the books wouldn't be pristine and designed according to a trend that will look dated in 2 years maximum is so sad... like you've got living life all wrong... but there's still hope...