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Who Is Reading Even for Anymore? Kat Rosenfield

Published

5 months ago

February 23, 2024

(Photo illustration by The Free Press; images via Getty Images and Alamy)

You’ve probably seen the famous photograph of Marilyn Monroe reading James Joyce’s Ulysses. If you have, you know that it is, on its face, an absurd image. Monroe is in full makeup, wearing a fashionable romper, seated on the wooden slat of a merry-go-round with a copy of the book in her lap. Her perch is so narrow, and her position so precarious, that it would have been a challenge to rest comfortably there for more than a few minutes, let alone to do so while immersed in one of the most famously difficult texts in the history of the Western canon.

If Marilyn Monroe read Ulysses, she was surely not actually reading it here—but this, as the meme goes, is bait. This image is an announcement that Monroe and the photographer alike are daring you to contradict, which of course you won’t, if you know what’s good for you. What’s your problem, guy? You think pretty girls can’t read?

Actress Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses by James Joyce, 1955 on Long Island, NY.(Eve Arnold/Magnum Photos)

Books have always led this sort of double life: as vehicles for story on one side, and on the other, as props in a performance. The book you read under the covers in the privacy of your home is not necessarily the one you read in a bar, or on the subway, or during the photo shoot explicitly designed to subvert your image as the stereotypical dumb blonde. With books—as with so many things—who we are and what we want live in tension with how we wish to be seen.

Last century’s moral binary between people who read and people who don’t (see: John Waters’ oft-quoted edict about not having sex with anyone who doesn’t have books in their house), has morphed into the more specific notion that the bookshelf is a window to the soul.

What can we glean from the library glimpsed over your shoulder on Zoom? What books on a shelf or bedside table signal not just bad taste but bad character? This latter question is the subject of endless pontificating on social media: a well-worn copy of Infinite Jest, for instance, is supposedly a red flag, although it’s hard to say for what. Then there are the dating-site troglodytes whose favorite books are too basic (To Kill a Mockingbird) or too popular (Twilight), exceeded in their heinousness only by those who don’t read much at all.

And of course, there’s the question of what to do if your date lets slip that he’s reading Jordan Peterson, a.k.a. He Who Must Not Be Named: Should you decline to go out with him again, or should you immediately run screaming from the restaurant?

What’s clear is that reading has been transformed from a private activity to a public one, something you do for an audience. Literature, and especially literature read by young people, has been a flashpoint in the culture wars since before the first outraged parent demanded that Judy Blume’s Forever be stripped from library shelves. But in the age of Goodreads review-bombing, YA Twitter pile ons, Bad Art Friends, and the bizarro universe of internecine literary conflicts known as BookTok, what used to be a niche form of drama has gone mainstream in the digital age. Books have content, but they also are content: posed alongside a glass of wine or cup of coffee in a photo bound for Instagram, or framing an irate TikToker as she monologues about whether audiobooks count as reading.

Actually opening the book and spending however many hours in private, thorough contemplation of the world inside? Of course, you can do this—and lots of people still do—but you’re not going viral that way. A recent interview—complete with sultry photoshoot—with the model Kaia Gerber, whose new book club is to internet culture what that Marilyn Monroe photo was to the pinup era, includes a revealing quote from actress Ayo Edebiri: “That girl be reading. That girl be reading, and she finishes them. A lot of the girls don’t finish the book. They just post ’em.”

This notion, that a person may claim to have read a book even if she has not, you know, read the book, suggests that “reader” is a category one can now identify into, one centered on affinity instead of activity. Consider the character-crafting around which White Lotus character lugged which title to the beach, or GQ’s recent list of the best “status” books for so-called Hot Guys, which contains not a single recommendation based on literary merit.

Jacob Elordi is seen outside the Today show—with a paperback—on October 24, 2023, in New York City. (Raymond Hall via Getty Images)

Readers are warned instead that Penguin Modern Classic covers are “unlikely to catch the wandering eye of a single gal (or guy) scanning the pub”—but the bright blue Fitzcarraldo Editions, from the London imprint, “will mark you out as someone with thoughts about the latest Patricia Lockwood essay.”

That the reader in question likely hasn’t read Lockwood’s latest essay, or even perhaps cannot read at all, is irrelevant. Who needs to read a book, when you can just look like the type of guy who does?

Of course, books are not the first pastime to be adopted as an aesthetic: consider the Patagonia vest-wearing tech bro, or urban hipsters in prairie dresses, or the vogue for “balletcore” among people who’ve never danced in their lives and couldn’t tell a pas de chat from a trou du cul. There is doing the thing, and then there is looking like you do the thing, which has an entirely different appeal.

But strange things happen when we reimagine the reading experience as something communal rather than individual—and hence, subject to the wisdom, or madness, of crowds. Social media has already transformed the way we talk about books, and the way we choose them. Against the backdrop of the culture wars, a book is more likely to be lauded for its politics, its representation, or the identity of its author, than the quality of the storytelling. The books that aren’t written according to these mores are quickly becoming the exception.

For the moment, a chasm has opened between these two types of readers—the ones quietly enjoying a book and the ones for whom books are content fodder. But it is the latter group, the public readers, whose tastes and desires have the most power to shape what we think of as “book culture”—and whose tastes and desires are shaped in turn by having to perform reading for an audience.

It’s possible to imagine a future in which some people read, and some identify as readers, and never the twain shall meet. In 2022, a popular BookTok creator described how he yearned for the days when it was just him and his library—and when he could finish a book without immediately turning on his front-facing camera to share his thoughts with the world. “I just want to get back to reading for reading’s sake,” he said.

He never posted again.

Kat Rosenfield is a columnist for UnHerd. Follow her on Twitter, now X, at @katrosenfield and read her latest Free Press story on Hulu’s “Murder at the End of the World.”

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Substacks

July 25, 2024 Heather Cox Richardson

Published

11 hours ago

July 26, 2024

Substacks

TGIF: The Week Unburdened by the Week That Has Been Suzy Weiss

Published

18 hours ago

July 26, 2024

Pro-Palestinian protesters gather outside of Union Station to protest Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the United States. (Probal Rashid via Getty Images)

Oh, no, it’s the sister again, for another slow news week. Let’s get to it.

→ Biden dropped out: Six years ago emotionally, but technically this past Sunday, Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race. He did it via X and promptly threw his support (and cash) behind Vice President Kamala Harris. Then he got Covid and hunkered down in Delaware—or depending on what hooch you’ve been drinking, died and was reanimated so he could appear before the cameras on Wednesday to address the nation. Joe’s family, including Hunter, sat along the wall of the Oval Office as he spoke. The president talked about the cancer moonshot, ending the war in Gaza, putting the party over himself, and Kamala’s tenacity, as Kamala’s pistol dug ever-so-slightly harder into his back. Right after, Jill, the First Lady of passive aggression, who apparently wanted to outdo her heart emoji, tweeted a handwritten note “to those who never wavered, to those who refused to doubt, to those who always believed.” I respect a First Lady who stands by her man and her energetic stepson. A First Lady who sees the high road way up there and says to herself, “If they want us out of here so bad, they can clean out the fridge and strip the beds themselves!”

→ Kamala is brat, Biden is boots, please God send the asteroid today: I’ve learned the hard way—and by that I mean my parents once asked me what “WAP” meant—that certain things should never be explained with words. It’s not that it’s impossible, it’s just that it embarrasses everyone.

That’s how I feel about the whole Kamala-is-brat thing. Brat is a good album about partying and getting older and having anxiety that was released earlier this summer by Charli XCX. But it’s since been adopted by too-online and very young people as a personality, and by Kamala Harris’s campaign as a mode to relate to those very young people. Her campaign is leaning into the whole green look of the album to try and win over Gen Z, and generally recasting her many viral moments—“You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” “I love Venn diagrams” “What can be, unburdened but what has been”—as calling cards. It’s like when Hillary went on Broad City, only this time more cringe.

And now we have Jake Tapper and Greg Gutfeld grappling with the “essence” and the “aesthetic” and overall vibe of brat girl summer. We used to be a serious country. We used to make things.

Here’s the thing about Kamla: she is hilarious and campy, but unintentionally so. Any goodwill that her goofy dances or weird turns of phrase garner should be considered bonus points, not game play. Was there ever any doubt that Fire Island would go blue? We’ve been debating whether Kamala’s meme campaign is a good move for her prospects in the Free Press Slack, and here I’ll borrow from my older and wiser colleague Peter Savodnik: “There is nothing more pathetic than an older person who cares what a younger person thinks is cool.”

→ Boomer behavior: While Kamala’s campaign is being run by a 24-year-old twink with an Adderall prescription, J.D. Vance’s speechwriter seems to be a drunk Boomer who just got kicked out of a 7-11. Vance, appearing this week at a rally in Middletown, Ohio, riffed, “Democrats say that it is racist to believe. . . well, they say it’s racist to do anything. I had a Diet Mountain Dew yesterday and one today, and I’m sure they’re going to call that racist too.” Crickets. Horror. Major “Thanks, Obama” energy. There was also a bit on fried bologna sandwiches and a lot of “lemme tell you another story.” The guy is 39 but sounds older than Biden.

Fresher, 35-to-60-year-old blood is exactly what we’ve been begging for. Let the Boomers boom, let the Zoomers zoom. Kamala and J.D.: act your age.

Substacks

July 25, 2024 Heather Cox Richardson

Published

22 hours ago

July 26, 2024

Momentum continues to build behind Vice President Kamala Harris to become the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, and the national narrative as a whole has shifted.

Democrats appear to be generating significant enthusiasm among younger Americans. Yesterday, for the first time in their history, the March for Our Lives organization endorsed a presidential candidate: Kamala Harris. Students from the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, organized March for Our Lives after the shooting there in 2018. Executive director Natalie Fall said that the organization “will work to mobilize young people across the country to support Vice President Harris and other down-ballot candidates, with a particular focus on the states and races where we can make up the margin of victory—in Arizona, New York, Michigan, and Florida.”

Andrea Hailey of Vote.org announced that in the 48 hours after President Biden said he would not accept the Democratic nomination, nearly 40,000 people registered to vote. That meant a daily increase in new registrations of almost 700%.

People are turning out for Harris in impressive numbers. In the hours after she launched her campaign, Win With Black Women rallied 44,000 Black women on Zoom and raised $1.6 million. On Monday, around 20,000 Black men rallied to raise $1.2 million. Tonight, challenged to “answer the call,” 164,000 white women joined an event that “broke Zoom” and raised more than $2 million and tens of thousands of new volunteers.

Another significant endorsement for Harris came yesterday from Geoff Duncan, the Republican former lieutenant governor of Georgia, who wrote on social media: “I’m committed to beating Donald Trump. The only vehicle left for me to do that with is the Democratic Party. If that requires me to vote for, speak for, or endorse [Kamala Harris] then count me in!” Duncan’s public announcement offers permission for other Georgia Republicans to make a similar shift. In 1964, South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond similarly paved the way for southern Democrats to vote for Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater.

Harris’s appearances are generating such enthusiasm from audiences that when she delivered the keynote address this morning at the convention of the American Federation of Teachers in Houston, Texas, the applause delayed her ability to begin. After a speech defending education and calling out the cuts to it in Project 2025, Harris ended by demonstrating that after decades of Democrats being accused of being anti-American, Trump’s denigration of the country has enabled the party to claim the position of being America’s defenders.

“When we vote, we make our voices heard,” Harris said. “So today, I ask you, AFT, are you ready to make your voices heard? Do we believe in freedom? Do we believe in opportunity? Do we believe in the promise of America? And are we ready to fight for it? And when we fight, we win! God bless you and God bless the United States of America.”

Today the Commerce Department reported that economic growth in the second quarter was higher than expected, coming in at 2.8%, thanks to higher spending driven by higher wages. The country’s changing momentum is showing in media stories hyping the booming economy Biden’s team tried for years to get traction on. “Full Employment is Joe Biden’s True Legacy” was the title of a story by Zachary Carter that appeared yesterday in Slate; CNN responded to today’s good economic news with an article by Bryan Mena titled: “The US economy is pulling off something historic.”

With Harris appearing to have sewn up the nomination, the question has turned to her vice presidential pick. That question is fueling the sense of excitement as potential choices are in front of cameras and on social media advocating Democratic positions and defending the United States from Trump’s denigration. Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro listed the economic gains of the past years, and said: “Trump, you’ve got to stop sh*t talking America. We’ve got to start standing tall and being patriotic and showing how much we love this amazing nation.”

The vice presidential hopefuls appear to be having some fun with showcasing their personalities, as Minnesota governor Tim Walz did in his video from the Minnesota State Fair where he and his daughter went on an extreme ride. So are social media users who have dug up old videos of, for example, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg explaining how he would pilot a small starfighter that had lost its auxiliary shields, or Arizona senator Mark Kelly’s identical twin brother Scott pranking a fellow astronaut on the Space Station with a gorilla suit Mark smuggled on board.

That sense of fun is an enormous relief after years of political weight, and it has spilled over into making fun of the Republican ticket, most notably with a false story that vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance wrote about—and I cannot believe I am typing this—having sex with a couch. The story is stupid, but worse are the denials of it, which have spread the story into populations that otherwise would likely not have seen it.

Just two weeks ago, Vance appeared to be the leader of the next generation of extremist MAGA Republicans, but now that calculation seems to have been hasty. Vance is a staunch opponent of abortion—the key issue in 2024—and he has been vocal in his disdain of women who have not given birth, saying in 2021, for example, that the U.S. was being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” He went on to say that people who don’t have children “don’t really have a direct stake” in the country.

Republican commentator Meghan McCain noted that Vance’s “comments are activating women across all sides, including my most conservative Trump supporting friends. These comments have caused real pain and are just innately unchristian.” Actor Jennifer Aniston, who tends to stay out of politics, posted: “I truly can’t believe this is coming from a potential VP of The United States.” Vance had called out Harris by name in those 2021 comments, and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff’s ex-wife Kerstin Emhoff took to social media to defend Harris from Vance’s attacks on her as “childless,” calling her “a co-parent with Doug and I. She is loving, nurturing, fiercely protective and always present. I love our blended family and am grateful to have her in it.” Harris’s stepdaughter chimed in: “I love my three parents.”

Vance also ties the Republican ticket firmly to Project 2025. The Trump camp has worked to distance itself from Project 2025—not convincingly, since the two are obviously closely tied, but it turns out that Vance wrote the introduction for a forthcoming book by Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, who was the lead author of Project 2025. The book appears to popularize that plan, right down to its endorsement of a “Second American Revolution,” and according to the book deal report, proceeds from the book will go to the Heritage Foundation “and aligned nonprofits.”

Now Vance’s words praising Project 2025 will be in print, just in time for the election. Yesterday, Trump posted: “I have nothing to do with, and know nothing about, Project 25 [sic]. The fact that I do is merely disinformation put out by the Radical Left Democrat Thugs. Do not believe them!”

Trump is clearly aware of, and concerned about, the changing narrative. This morning, he called in to Fox & Friends, saying, “We don’t need the votes. I have so many votes. I’m in Florida now…and every house has a Trump-Vance sign on it. Every single house…. It’s amazing the spirit…. This election has more spirit than I’ve ever seen ever before.” Tonight the Trump campaign proved their worry by backing out of debates with Harris, saying debates can’t be scheduled until she is the official nominee, although Biden was not the official nominee when they met in June.

The larger narrative shift has affected the media approach to Trump, who is accustomed to shaping perceptions as he wishes. Now, 12 days after the mass shooting at his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, there is increasing media attention to the fact that there has still been no medical report on Trump’s injuries, although he wore a large bandage on his ear at the Republican National Convention and said at a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on Saturday that he “took a bullet for democracy.”

Yesterday, FBI director Christopher Wray told Congress that it is not clear whether Trump was “grazed” by a bullet or by shrapnel, words that former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance called “FBI speak for, ‘it’s unlikely it was a bullet.’”

CNN chief medical consultant Dr. Sanjay Gupta noted last week that the people need a real medical evaluation of Trump’s injuries, explaining that “gunshot blasts near the head can cause injuries that aren’t immediately noticeable, such as bleeding in or on the brain, damage to the inner ear or even psychological trauma.” But, as Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo has noted, much of the press has kept mum about the story.

Media outlets have reported Wray’s testimony, though, and in a social media post today, Trump called on Wray, whom he appointed to head the FBI, to resign from his post for “LYING TO CONGRESS.” Tonight, he reiterated that “it was…a bullet that hit my ear, and hit it hard.”

Perhaps eager to get back to their districts, House Republicans canceled their expected votes on appropriations bills scheduled for next week and left town today for their August recess. The House will not reconvene until early September. The government’s fiscal year 2025 begins on October 1.

—

Notes:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/24/opinion/trump-lies-charts-data.html

https://marchforourlives.org/in-a-first-ever-endorsement-march-for-our-lives-endorses-kamala-harris-for-president/

https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/us-economic-growth-regains-steam-second-quarter-inflation-slows-2024-07-25/

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/07/biden-economy-employment-inflation.html

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/25/entertainment/jennifer-aniston-jd-vance/index.html

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/25/economy/us-economy-gdp-second-quarter/index.html

https://www.mediamatters.org/heritage-foundation/jd-vance-wrote-foreword-book-project-2025-architect-kevin-roberts-and-proceeds

https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-might-not-shot-1930037

https://people.com/was-trump-struck-by-bullet-or-shrapnel-fbi-director-testifies-8683340

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trump-wants-fbi-director-resign-immediately-chris-wray-rcna163641