Against the objectification of books (or, some thoughts on The Discourse).

A few weeks back, The Washington Post ran a piece spotlighting “super readers,” a self-selecting class of book nerds who pride themselves on reading very, very fast. I clicked on this article even as my hackles rose, and some pre-programmed scorn settled in the back of my throat. Why, I asked the author, who could not hear me in Washington — Why pedestal the reader who goes to books like a buffet, craving quantity? Why is our culture so intent on praising folks for reading not wider or more deeply, but faster and more ? That’s a rhetorical question, of course. This late in the timeline, I can’t pretend to be surprised by the symptoms of capitalism. Books are not exempt from our relentless, always-be-optimizing productivity culture . Maris Kreizman observed a trend toward their “bulletpointification” in a recent column. “It’s troubling to see books treated like mere vessels for self-betterment the way that cold-water therapy and Fitbits are,” she wrote. I tend to agree. What strikes me — and Kreizman, later in her essay — is the profound incompatibility between the object of the book and the ethos of productivity. Novels, in general, take a long time to create and consume. Unlike other cultural products like, say, the TikTok, they are not necessarily designed for single-use, speedy consumption. Their effects, too, are nebulous. Such that they cannot be repurposed for advertising in easy, obvious ways. Because what one can “get” from a novel is rarely clear at the outset, their quantitative consumption — or, let’s just call it binging them, to keep with the times — seems particularly silly. And what do we hope to “get ,” anyway? When it’s not merely working as a portal to another universe, what’s a book even for these days? * If we follow the implicit WaPo thesis, one answer to this question might be: “being a metric for self-improvement.” After all, “super” is not a bad word to hear applied to oneself. Ditto, “achiever.” Or, “Meeter-of-goals.” I know from personal experience that apps like Goodreads, which allow one to set an […]

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