There is a great variety of articles, videos and other types of informational material out there in the world that instruct us to read more books. There is booktok and the dark academia influencers that constantly recommend these books that are more reminiscent of bricks that you can use to build a wall (Seriously, jake edwards should try doing that with the amount of books he owns). It feels overwhelming to be behind all of the reading that the internet is seemingly doing right? I felt this way too and when I began reading books just to be through them, I ended up reading an impressive number of books (at the time was like 20-25 books), but I didn’t even understand half of them. Despite this rewarding experience I was still feeling like I was deceiving myself, and truth be told, I was. I was reading for others and not myself, to gain some sort of approval and maybe join in the conversation when someone’s talking about books. At least I tried reading and I ended up learning a couple of lessons about reading. The true joy of reading a book and finding out what I actually enjoyed reading. Now I intend to share what I know about what consistently reading has taught me.
One of the reasons why I felt that I was deceiving others was that I did not particularly enjoy what I was reading. I was reading the books they had recommended to me, (which almost included Tam Kaur and Colleen Hoover but thank god the trend moved on so quickly that I never got my hands on it) but I felt like something was wrong, that I just wasn’t getting it. Turns out, I just don’t enjoy today’s most popular genres (Fantasy, romance and contemporary fiction in general), I like a genre that wasn’t really recommended on booktok (unless of course you ended up on that side of it), I liked non-fiction and gothic literature. It took me a while to figure out, especially because the algorithm on tiktok would only show me the cartoon cover romance type of books and I never knew how to get recommendations that suited me better. The first time I ended up picking up a gothic work was actually through south park, there was an episode were the goth kids and they were summoning the soul of Edgar Allan Poe and I thought to myself ‘Huh, I kinda like their victorianish style, maybe Poe’s writing is similar to that aesthetic’ and oh my god, did I like what I read, he became my favorite author extremely quickly. From then on, I just started to search up the terms that I enjoyed from what I read; Victorian, gothic, poetry, etc…And that’s how I ended up creating an algorithm where at least I saw the creators that recommended what I would enjoy.
Another lesson I learned was about the quantity and quality of the books. In this sphere of readers, I felt that I was behind because people were finishing books left and right, recommending the readers 10 books at once and god, how could anyone even have this much time to read? Turns out the problem was that this whole trend was more about purchasing the books than to read them. It also implanted new and strengthened old prejudices about books that many people cannot shake off today. I believe everyone has heard this statement by now: ‘Wimpy Kid is not a real book’. By today’s society, the mere fact that a book has illustrations or includes photography disqualifies it from being a book. I am not saying literature, I would assume you would not qualify a photography book as literature, but it is still flesh and bone or, in this case, cover and spine, a book. It has an ISBN number and it was published by an author, that is the definition of a book! I cannot believe that we have put ourselves in tiny boxes and limited ourselves to knowledge we can obtain from reading to only the classics and a selection of fiction. We are forgetting the fact that all of this is media and all of it carry some sort of entertainment, artistic or literary value. Visit a bookshop and try to look at all of the bookshelves, there are books about history, art, society, poetry… There are magazines, photography books and the stuff you’d put on a coffee table and rarely read unless it’s the doctor’s office and you’re waiting for your appointment. All of it is wonderful. In fact, it seems we have forgotten the art of studying from textbooks and just switched to reading the powerpoints our lecturers have provided us instead. Well, of course you’d only read 5 books a year, because you push away anything that doesn’t fit a very narrow criteria for reading.
In the year 2025, I made it to my goal to read 50 books and I successfully completed it. It would be a waste of space and time to copy paste it all but I will breakdown to how I did it (as someone who barely ‘reads’). First off, the great majority of the books I read where textbooks. At first I assumed it was cheating because if you only read through chapters 7 to 13, why would you check off an entire book as read? Well, because every year I read hundreds of pages of books just to take exams on it and know the contents by heart of course. If you learn something from a book, if you take away a message and appreciate the writing, then you read it. With this philosophy in mind, I ticked off all of the books my lecturers made me read in a year, this on its own totalled to about 10 books. Then I read short stories, some were 8 pages, some were 30. Still, I read it from start to finish and learned something from it. I loved the lottery by Shirley Jackson, and it took like 3 minutes to read, but it still moved me. I read poetry books, essays, zines, magazines and guides. I was exposed to so much more than I could imagine just by going through all of the categories I could find on catalogues. The total number of novels I read for my own pleasure with over 200 pages was only 10. But I learned so much about fashion history by flipping through old volumes of J-fashion magazines, read a ton of essays on literature by reading an indie literary magazine and studied italian by reading short stories in italian.
This was actually on the tip of the iceberg of the reading I had done throughout the year. To be fair, a great majority of the reading I did was through the internet. Nowadays people complain about the AI takeover and the ‘enshitification’ of everything. I believe that there are still wonderful uses of the internet if you expand your horizons from the five social media sites you check everyday. For beginners, reddit is an amazing place to find inspiration, in fact I came across entire comments turned into master docs or books on there a few times and delved into some fun rabbitholes. You might also consider avoiding Google for a moment or instead of searching on YouTube, look for written explanations of what you are trying to learn. This can lead you to some interesting articles or books written by experts! That being said, I would like to share some ideas to get you started. First off all, there some great essay focused websites out there such as the electric typewriter: https://tetw.org/ , the guardian: https://www.theguardian.com and aeon: https://aeon.co/. Besides this, there is a huge catalogue of blog pages that are defunct yet still archived on the internet today. A very beautiful one I found was the gothic charm school: https://www.gothic-charm-school.com/ the website is extremely pretty! I hope you have fun checking these out.
To summarize this mess of an article, I believe that reading should not be based on standards of social media but rather what we find enjoyment in. There is so much more to reading than just the latest trends and you should chase after what gives you enjoyment, note down exactly what it is that you liked and pursue that. Read more than just novels, read pamphlets, zines, web pages, everything. It’s useless to force yourself to simply reading more books if the books you are reading are not giving any entertainment or teaching you anything, it’s simply mindless consumption. So go ahead in the real world and read for pleasure and to seek out a greater understanding of our world.