On Books

My mother always said that she dreamt of living in a house with a big library. An entire room dedicated to books. I thought it was a nice idea, but I didn’t really understand the true meaning behind it. My surface-level reading of her desire was that it was simply something stolen from a fairytale, or a pretty picture in a magazine. Who can blame her? Even the Beast was enamoured by Belle’s beautifully brainy bookishness in Disney’s animated classic.

But in a landscape where we are inundated with short-reels on mobile-video sites screaming for our attention, and our ever-waning ability to stop scrolling because someone is claiming they can fit 45 Maltesers in their mouth, the ability to stop and read for any amount of time is becoming a rare and special thing.

Now, with awareness that this might be pretentious - there is something effortlessly appealing about libraries and bookshops where tombs just sit there asking to be picked up. They don’t SEO their titles, they don’t have brand sponsorships, they merely ask you to gawk at them, scan the blurb, measure up its value or interest in your head, and offers you their knowledge and wisdom without screaming for your attention like the ‘content’ that endlessly populates the home pages of YouTube, Instagram and TikTok. In other words, they are effortlessly cool, and way beyond doing increasingly stupid pranks for your attention - like creating increasingly mad challenges or games to keep you hooked.

Without trying to completely undermine the value of that type of content - apart from pure stimulation, distraction or empty entertainment - what do we get out of watching another Mr Beast video? It’s fine to be mindlessly distracted from time to time - but if everything is geared towards doing just that - isn’t it essentially a type of addiction? 

Of course, not everything we consume has to be nourishing, and like art - other media does not necessarily have to serve a ‘purpose’, but as I get older, I can’t help but think about how things I consume affect me. Perhaps this is also related to the idea of intentionality. Why am I consuming this in the first place - is there some emotion or situation that I am avoiding or distracting myself from? But moreover - do I know what effect consuming this is having on me?

I also think about the ways we participate in the consumption of media. In my mind, there are two major ways we can interact with ‘content’, and perhaps this can even be extended to ways in which we interact with the wider world around us. We can interact ‘passively’ which is what the majority of us do: coming home fried and exhausted after work, and falling into a routine of just sitting there watching television, mindlessly letting it wash over us, either not fully focussing or engaging with it, sometimes having it on in the background. We don’t need to engage with it, we just ‘watch’ it, or even worse, we passively watch it while passively watching another screen (our phones). It’s passive squared. And it’s so easy, perhaps too easy, to do.

But when we sit and read a book, we intentionally create space. And I am finding that this intentionality is everything. We get comfortable, change our clothes, turn our phone on silent, or go to a different room to go read. We choose something to read with intent - we know that our focus and attention is limited - so we want to read something good - something that is entertaining, emotional, insightful, healing, inspiring, fantastic, escapist, real. And we engage with the words - because we have to. To read is to actually use our brains, and to use them in a different way than ‘work’ or ‘TV’. It’s withdrawing from the activity of the world, but still finding a way to be active, to be… present. And in a millennium where our presence is our most valuable currency - I know that I’d rather be getting something more nourishing for my attention, than simply pouring it all down a digital plug hole in return for empty dopamine.

I also think about book choice. We should enjoy the hunt for a good book. Substack recommendations, book clubs, booktok influencers, editors picks are all well and good, but like most things, they should really just be signposts. How about asking a bookshop employee in person what their most recent favourite read has been, or what is their genre of expertise? Or going to a few different bookshops, having a perusal and seeing for yourself what catches your own eye? Like fashion - we must also be vigilant that some books have become ‘trendy’ and that we read something to be seen reading it, or to say that we have read it - but did we actually get something from it? Moreover - did we actually enjoy it? We must hunt for the books that resonate with us, that touch us and move us, as it’s the development of our own, unique, weird tastes that is a key facet of our personal development and individuation as human beings.

So here’s to the eternal endurance of the book, beyond the superficial signifiers of the latest TikTok aesthetic trend, like dark academia, or any pretentious romanticism of wanting to be seen as bookish. And here’s to books being seen as cool again - not that they ever went anywhere in the first place.