How do we mend the reading crisis? The reading recession? Anti-Intellectualism? Declining literacy rates or whatever else you want to call it?

We don’t read as much as we used to.  We don’t see young people reading Charlotte Bronte on park benches (minus the jorts-wearing, matcha sipping ‘feminist’ activists). It’s sad. I remember crying over Tess of the D'Urbervilles at the park a few years ago. I remember reading Anna Karenina on the train to school and a passerby asking me if I enjoyed meeting Anna and Vronsky. Retrospectively, these moments now feel like relics of a former life. I crave meeting readers who enjoy reading. Who enjoy White Nights not because it’s suddenly Bookstagrammable.

But, after spending months grappling with the curated nonchalance of Instagram stories captioned ‘I read Joan Didion’, I have stopped worrying. Maybe the problem isn’t that people aren’t reading—maybe it’s because they want to read differently.

As someone who didn’t have Instagram until I was nearly eighteen (I live under a rock), I find the behaviour of posting about books a bit absurd. Perhaps it's because I had read books like White Nights and The Bell Jar before they became trendy online. I read these books in solitude and quietly returned them to my bookshelf.

What’s the point of the public declaration? I often think. Isn’t reading meant to be a private act? In my head I often think about the image of my grandfather, silently pairing chai with Tagore’s poetry on a cold Himalayan morning. He was bit of a bookworm who habitually but quietly annotated the margins of his books. Reading, for him, was like an act of meditation. It was fiercely private but deeply passionate. Indeed, the traditional image of the reader is similarly solitary; Elizabeth Bennet silently reading in the library at Netherfield Park; Jo March reading in the attic. But maybe that’s where the traditional image is lost in the anachronism of the past. Maybe reading isn’t meant to be solitary in our era of unbridled technological advancements. Indeed, we live in a time where AI platforms like Replika promise to offer us the companionship we crave. What use is there for books?

Most of us have heard of the loneliness epidemic. It has been quite well documented and talked about in recent years. According to the World Health Organization, around 17–21% of individuals aged between 13 and 29 years reported feeling lonely, with the highest rates among teenagers. Similarly, a study published by Natalie Pennington, a Communications professor at Colorado State University, and her co-authors, established how approximately half of the participants in a sample of nearly 6000 college students and adults reported feeling not as close to their friends as they would like.

In our modern reality, we spend more time making plans to catch up with friends than acting on them. We crave greater depth and intimacy, but our Friday nights are spent watching trashy films or scrolling through TikTok. Given these paradoxes, reading can feel quite alienating. What’s the point of attempting to read Kafka or Proust when you already feel alone? Perhaps in this way, publicly announcing ‘I read Joan Didion’ is an attempt to reach out. Maybe by posting I want to talk to someone—anyone—who has also read the book I am obsessed with. Perhaps I really do want to read Joan Didion without the process feeling like I am reading her in a vacuum.

Starting a book club has taught me that the problem behind the reading crisis isn’t simply that people don’t want to read; they don’t want to read alone. This was a humbling realisation for someone who decided to start a book club because I wanted to prevent anti-intellectualism (interpret that as you like). Over the last year the book club has been doing quite well. We have read books ranging from Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground to Han Kang’s The Vegetarian and Suzie Miller’s Prima Facie. It’s a diverse collection which reflects the diversity of the book club. In fact, most of our book club members have various non-literary backgrounds, majoring in areas such as pure mathematics, accounting and medicine.

Reading in a book club provides the social intimacy that reading alone does not. Reading a novel like Han Kang’s The Vegetarian can be very intimidating if read alone. It’s the kind of narrative that requires several trigger warnings and can be deeply depressing. However, pairing Kang’s novel with the film K-Pop Demons Hunters followed by a comparative PowerPoint and lively discussion is invigorating. That’s precisely what our book club did for one of our meetings.  We were cooped up in a friend’s student accommodation and maybe the popcorn got a bit messy. But that’s the thing with book clubs. They are meant to be messy. When I say, ‘book club’, I don’t mean curated cafe aesthetics. I mean disorganised living rooms, Carlton Garden strolls, coffees outside the Geelong library. I mean stimulating discussions and lively debates, bookstore wanderings and my fellow readers booing me for suggesting Foucault’s The History of Sexuality. ‘We will read that next time!’ they say, choosing Hemingway instead.

When we lament society’s supposed anti-intellectualism, we often forget our own privilege. Admitting privilege is uncomfortable but it profoundly shapes our reading habits—what we read, who we read, the genres we are exposed to among other things. I started reading Kafka when I was ten or eleven. But that was purely because I stumbled upon Kafka in my mother’s library, which is admittedly much more picturesque than confronting Kafka on an Instagram reel. Yet, in many ways, the BookTok aesthetic has democratised reading. When I was initially planning this piece, I was venting to a friend about BookTok making classics social media props.

But that isn’t the real story. Maybe it’s even the opposite.

BookTok increasingly promotes the type of literature that was once gatekept. And maybe that’s why we attack it for fuelling the reading crisis. Maybe the outrage we feel mirrors my outrage when everyone suddenly started listening to Laufey. My personal, private musician, who was once my beloved secret, entered the cultural zeitgeist from which I could no longer claim her as my own. Once upon a time, the Typical of Me era artist had an indie appeal entirely different from commercial music. But this was shattered the moment my peers started vibing with From the Start and Valentine on TikTok. I could no longer claim my authenticity as an OG fan and my pride of exclusivity shattered. That’s probably the same reason why my initial reaction to BookTok wasn’t particularly cordial. I was too attached to the conceited nostalgia of holding books like Metamorphosis and Wuthering Heights as my private property. I was unwilling to share them. If everyone starts reading Kafka, how do I claim my authenticity? How do I let them know that I was here first?

Reading exists as a social dialectic. Somone would have definitely read Proust or Hemmingway before you and their interpretation would have arguably affected your own reading. That’s probably why we associate Virgina Woolf with feminism and Albert Camus with absurdism before even reading them. That being said, I am not unaware. Performative reading does exist. It is troubling to see individuals rushing through books such as War and Peace or Ulysses to bag more classics. I am also annoyed by short-form content diluting the layers behind a beloved novel. However, while nostalgia pushes us towards the image of the lone and noble reader, it’s high time to admit that the image is a little romanticized and even self-flattering. 

Books are fun little creatures. They are sturdy, strange and hefty but far more generous when held collectively.  What book club has shown me is that reading was never meant to be a test of individual intellect. Reading was meant to be shared. Even something as gut-wrenching as The Vegetarian seems more accessible when someone parallels Rumi to Yeong-Hye before crying over Jinu. Maybe the future of reading requires us to avoid looking backwards. Perhaps engaging with literature in an increasingly fragmented world is meant to be communal, imperfect, democratic, a little chaotic, and maybe a little bit performative. Indeed, we must question whether the Joan Didion aesthetic encouraging people to read Didion is really that anti-intellectual at all.

Whilst I miss the solitary reader on park benches, the story of the social reader remains one worth telling. It is unfolding now, on this very page, and is just beginning. Adieu to the old age of reading. The new age of reading welcomes us.