i just wish there was more discussion of the actual content of books in online communities. booktok just feels like watching a slideshow of pretty or iconic book covers. of course the medium of short-form video encourages this kind of visual engagement. it would be nice if we encouraged more book-club style discussion that actually builds a community of readers rather than a collection of images.
That's why i prefer getting book recommendations from booktube. Booktok is a fun way to see what others read and what not but if I want to actually know what a book is about I'm coming to UA-cam
@clairherrington6328 They exist on Facebook, which has 3 billion users, and TikTok has 1.58 billion users. Facebook is still number one on the social media platforms UA-cam, WhatsApp, Instagram, and TikTok are behind respectively. People who run online book clubs use multiple platforms to drive people to the book clubs. People create channels on Discord. You're right they exist and aren't dominant, but they probably will grow with time.
For all I know (because I'm not on the TikTok), the short form leads to recognizing shared casual interests that can be taken to Discord servers or blogs, group chats, or other social media. While I've read some of the core coquette canon mentioned (The Virgin Suicides, Lolita, The Bell Jar-as well as Girl, Interrupted that I have caught mentioned often in hashtags where I do go, but I don't know if it's canon) I have not noticed much "book club" type discussion questions about them...but that's probably because I'm not SUCH a big fan of those specific titles that I need to talk about them with people. But I am also thinking that maybe there are discussions about the literary techniques and themes, or maybe it doesn't "need" discussion amongst people in this specific bookish subculture because each reader's relationship to the book is so personal...so there's mostly no words, only vibes, because when I read Girl, Interrupted then I was not in a communicative era of my life either. It doesn't mean readers are not getting meaningfully impacted by a story, only because they don't want to talk about narrative devices or historical context or characterization. Maybe it's a different conversation surrounding the disaster girlboss types of stories? (My limitations are the same. I have read a Gillian Flynn book and I thought it was interesting but did not love it enough to fall in with others who read and love Gillian Flynn books, to find out if the stereotype mentioned/quoted in the video is true about vapid interactions with "heavy" themes...and that's crime fiction, anyway, rather than the more broadly appealing portrait of a mess of a millennial woman. Maybe there is more scattershot, grassroots sharing of reader sentiments about it...instead of the register we would get with like guided questions for a Book Club.)
no need to clarify, I 100% get what you're saying here! I ran a book club for a couple of years and it was one of the most gratifying experiences of the past few years. Interestingly, there were around 1000 people participating in the book club each week (it took place via newsletter, so I could see how many people opened the emails) but whenever I posted a picture of the book on Instagram to let people know the newsletter had been sent, that post got between 5 and 10k likes - sometimes even 20k+. So there's definitely a disconnect here. There's a disproportionate demographic who loves to consume the idea of reading, comparing to the number of people actually engaging in the reading...
the comment about "why does sexiness have to be in everything women are interested in" needs a whole separate video because girl!! I don't want reading to be sexy pls I just want to enjoy a book
What i dislike is that these trends present themselves as from girls for girls but they're really just about a certain type of girl. Girl who dates men, who seemingly stands out but not to the point its revolting to general society, who is confused in life but has enough money to stay confused instead of needing to be occupied just to stay alive. They have money, they at least seem heteronormative, they are special without being too special to the point where it's shunned by society. It's not feminist and groundbreaking and encompassing the "girlhood experience", it's just a book written by a woman. It doesn't have to be those special things, but those labels keep being thrown on it, isolating those of us who already hardly fit in into society's idea of womanhood.
I concur. It's perfectly fine as a NICHE, readers are going to find and like what they read at the time of their life that it's exactly what they personally need... but as a TREND especially one described as "more inclusive"-I do not think that is true at all. It's not more inclusive.
I agree, there's a type of girl that is represented in these communities and it can feel discouraging when you're trying to be on booktok when all the books being suggested are clearly for a specific type of girl
exactly! also, i understand that everyone needs a community and it makes sense to make it "gendered", but not only do these trends segregate other marginalized individuals, but they also make it a bit weird for the non-conforming folks. when you revolve all of your interests around gender, soon enough we'll have the same problems we've been facing for decades, alienating girls and boys who don't fit the standards. the "not like other girls" girls are coming back slowly but surely because these manufactured ideas of "girlhood" are strongly coming back when it's so important to talk about how gender essentialism wounds us as a society, but especially those who are hurt by patriarchy. and what's even worse right now, compared to years prior, is that if you try to point out that contradiction, you're being misogynistic.
this is a valid point and I would have liked to add a note about the fact that the vast majority of the protagonists here are able-bodied/ traditionally attractive but that might be another video in itself!
Because to write a book on the types of women you described, is to create a product that's hardly gonna sell. People might feel like oddballs simply for being a little quirky in high school so they feel different, though in reality they're not really that weird - but people who are truly weird (think people who enjoy Doctor Who) are a very small minority of the world. As for queer experiences there is plenty of modern books on that bc queer characters have been on the rise and another common trend. The Sad Girl novel is just a different niche, it makes no sense to compare the two unless you specifically wanted a sad girls novel with a queer character. To make a sad girl novel where the character isn't financially privileged is to create art that's too realistic, therefore depressing. Most people look into books for escapism, and to resolve a broke sad girl's issues takes more effort or maybe even suspense of beliefs. People will be more likely to critique the afromentioned, because of it was that easy to get a job or get out of a slump, why don't people do it by the thousands? By focusing on world out of the common reader's grasp, helps evade such criticism. Just my speculation. It's also possible, that most of sad girl novels are written by traditionally published authors, which is usually an already privileged demographic, hence why they write from that perspective. You rarely see people in traditional media spaces who have the life experience of the regular person or who's gone through poverty
Books feel like that one purchase/product that you don't have to feel bad for indulging in because they have a general positive connotation. I think that indulging in amassing a large collection of books that felt less frivolous than shoes or clothes because it signified higher intellectual pursuits. But one thing people, especially people online like to do is judge women. Women can never just have an interest; it has to be her 'faking' it or to appeal to men.
I mean I don't necessarily agree with that sentiment. I think that amassing a large collection of books just to have books rather than to read them is just as bad as purchasing a bunch of shoes or clothes and never wearing them. There are people online, mainly the popular women booktubers/booktokers/bookinstagramers who have huge shelves filled with books but would note that they have only read like 100/600 books on their shelves. That is just adding to environmental impacts since there is a lot that goes into printing books and whatnot. It is just wasteful for them to keep buying trendy books and to flash their bookshelves without actually appreciating the privilege it is to buy and read books. I don't necessarily think it comes down to people "judging women just to judge women" but it is rather calling them out for pretty much participating in the book version of fast fashion.
@@stephanieblack2114while you're not wrong regarding the overconsumption, two things can be true at the same time. The biggest book hoarder I've seen online is Jack Edwards who's obviously not a woman and I don't see anyone calling him out. Besides, I'm not sure how many people collect books and *never* read them. The majority probably do it, but slowly. It objectively takes less time to buy a book than to read it, while both can be pleasant experiences. We can condemn promoting overcosumption online and at the same time obstain from making assumptions that women who buy a lot of books don't read them and only do that to show off. That might be the case with some, but unlikely to be the general rule.
my two cents on why the hot girl/cool girl/sad girl book lists are all the SAME books is that it takes time to read new books, and the trend cycle is much faster than the time it takes a normal person to read say, ten books for a new list for a new aesthetic. so these accounts who have read boy parts or whatever have to reuse that book for multiple posts with different angles to keep the content mill churning. i prefer booktube channels like this that go more indepth on a topic over booktok/bookstagram accounts that reuse the same books for content over and over
That’s a good point, actually, although I think there’s also a lost of overlap in themes between the various trends and books are inherently complex things. I’ve never come across a good book that was just one thing
What really bothers me is how corporate so many of these books are. A ton of people use reading as an escape from the capitalist world we're in, but a lot of these books are there just for the cash grab of it all. There are so many corporate romance books that booktok is devouring, and i find it so strange how all these books are so cookie cutter copy and paste. And it reminds me a lot of the over consumption that happens outside of books because of tiktok, for example Stanley Cups. It's like these books have become fun new items and the contents don't truly matter, the aesthetic of owning so many books does. That just feeds right into rich business peoples pockets. it's just smth that has always irked me.
We should also talk about the over-consumption of books that comes with these trends. It's one thing to read those books and enjoy them, and a whole other thing to buy every single book that is trending at the moment just so you can post pictures/reels of them online to creat a bookish persona.
People do not use libraries enough! They constantly want new books instead of waiting a little for them to get to their local library, which saves so much money and is way easier because if you don't like the book, you can just return it. My mom was recently at the library getting a book and she found out that shes saved around five thousand dollars on books by borrowing them in the last sixteen years that shes been using that library.
Lolita had the unreliable narrator device to make a point about who gets taken in by erudition despite all the horror between the lines that what is happening is wrong. Angela Carter asserted that Juliette by the Marquis de Sade showed an awareness of the oppression and exploitation of women...but I stopped reading after the man forced his wife to eat somebody else's vomit (not that the early part of the book at the nunnery wasn't horrific. It was, but I thought I should read the whole thing to criticize it and then pointless violence continued until I got worn down.) But still, 120 Days of Sodom partially inspired Dennis Cooper's no-holds-barred explorations/subversions of "the gay serial killer pederast" stereotype that I do often find some heart to it and an actual point in all the De Sade influenced gruesomeness. (I have read Frisk and Cooper's short story collection titled Wrong.) Even if De Sade himself didn't necessarily have a point in these salacious, depraved libertine novels. Also inspired Pier Paolo Pasolini's movie "Salo" (don't know how to make the accent on this keyboard) that was a protest against fascism. I even caught an allusion to De Sade in Down A Dark Hall by Lois Duncan, even though De Sade was not named I admit to a spark of pride that I could recognize the reference, and how that quickly turned into a real horror for the sake of the characters at the implications of the story. Making the Marquis de Sade "trendy and controversial" might be a good thing for broader discussions-but as a broader society that would be having those discussions we are...probably not there yet. Heck, I am still personally working on forgiving Angela Carter for casually putting out in an Oprah magazine featurette that Juliette as a book was good actually. (Half-joking. Grr, Angela Carter..."top 10 anime betrayals"...)
I love how your videos always make me rethink whatever POV I might have on a situation. I think it's so easy to get carried away with the blame train and disregard how everything has deeper roots. I appreciate the depth of your research!! much love
I hope one day non-fiction becomes popular in booktok. There are a lot of amazing stories that happen in the real world too and would perhaps be a refreshing change of pace.
I need recommendations too because all the none fictions people have told me to read so far are...depressing. Idk why I was surprised since the real world often is.
@@aisling_90 I recently finished Braiding Sweetgrass and Gathering Moss by Robin Kimmerer. She's a Potawatomi moss ecologist who can artfully intertwine native heritage and scientific literature. Reading her feels like drinking warm soup to me. I'm currently reading Spare Parts: Four Undocumented Teenagers, One Ugly Robot, and the Battle for the American Dream by Joshua Davis. I'm not finished with it yet but I can already tell it's going to stick with me in a positive way. I also read The Final Forest by William Dietrich over the holidays and I was amazed by how thorough his investigative journalism was. The fight over Olympic National Forest can be depressing for sure, but he really looked at every side of the issue and actually learning more about lumbermen helped me feel a lot more connected to them. With how biased current news is, I felt truly touched by his craft. The harvesting of that old growth forest was pretty much a full blown war and when I look at old pictures from that time, I'm so touched by how fiercely people defended it and continue to defend it. I hope you find any one of those intriguing!
@er6113 I'm not the OP so sorry for butting in, but I really enjoyed Free by Lea Ypi it's a coming of age memoir which takes place around the fall of communism in Albania. It's about growing up in totalitarian society, family history and political turmoil I really enjoyed it. A history of the World in 100 objects, I loved this book, it's just amazing, it does what it says on the tin, its history book that tells the story of humanity through objects that were, made, used and loved by people throughout history, not the just the 'great and the good' but everyone. The chapters are self contained, so you can just skip parts that don't interest you, social and material history is really interesting, and shows that history is not just about battles, politics, class warfare, economic trends ect. but about people, who lived and breathed like us, and how they lived their life. I used to study classics, so I would recommend anything by Mary Beard she's amazing and makes Roman history really accessible, if you're not massively into classics, then Women and Power a Manifesto is a really good short read. The Ark Before Noah, by Irving Finkel, Irving Finkel is my spirit animal haha, this is a really interesting read, which shows that the story of Abrahamic religions had a long history in the Levant and Mesopotamia long before, biblical texts ect. IMesopotamia.. Irving Finkel also has a diaries project which is really cool, and collects diaries of everyday individuals into a larger collection, I hope something is published from this someday :) I know it's been recommended to death but, I really enjoyed A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Stories in Our Genes by Adam Rutherford, I'm not a science guy haha, but I really enjoyed this, it traces developments in our genetics, what this tells about how humanity developed. I don't read a lot of non fiction tbh, I'm more of fiction guy, but I did really enjoy these.
Guess I agree that books have become a casualty of the identity rush you see online, but I still don't know how widespread that is irl outside of the US/UK. Regardless of the aesthetics motivation and its part in it though, I can't help but feel glad seeing new bookstores being opened in Kyiv despite the war and filled with young people. On the other side, the critique of book overconsumption, despite having valid points, will probably always have some notes of misogyny and snobbery, there's no getting away from that in the nearest future🙄
Book trends, like all trends, come and go and will cycle for eternity, dependent on highly subjective reasoning - popularity, marketing, supply, etc. I think too the reader herself cycles through her own trends. For example, I just got out of a massive classics trend and am now gravitating toward more contemporary literary fiction. I've had moments where all I want to read are romance, all I want to read is YA Scifi/paranormal, etc. etc. I also think this discourse tends to only settle around female readers. Nobody talks about how men only really read from a few genres, that they're all reading practically the same handful of books, that they stop reading after childhood because there is a hole in the Male YA canon, and how men feel like they run out of options and are forced to settle on non-fiction by adulthood because they're not successfully marketed to in the same way women readers are (IK IK Poor men!!!! /snark)
Not sure about the last part being sarcastic or not so I'll take it as good faith and agree i can find 50 ya books focused on girls and girl things before i find a guy ya and I've read a few i feel like they are more prevalent in middle grade when boys still have time to read
idk if this is the right video or context to say this but one thing i've noticed is that all these 'aesthetic' trends seem to be so so focussed on white heterosexual (or heteronormative) women. i've yet to see a book by a bipoc or queer author be featured in these aeethetics and tbh, it's a thing i've noticed in the romance reading circles as well. idk if that is why i feel so alienated towards this digital 'bookish culture' but i would really appreciate it if someone did a video on this too.
this is a great point and definitely appropriate for this comment section! will add this to my list of video ideas, although I am white and straight, so not sure I'm the best person to speak on it...
R.F. Kuang's book "Babel", and Andy Mientus's book "Fraternity" were marketed as genre dark academia. Andrew Joseph White's book The Spirit Bares Its Teeth also looks very interesting to me. While not necessarily bookish, I heard the Art Hoe aesthetic was a decolonialization and anti-racism initiative aimed at recontextualizing fine arts and paintings...that became overwhelmed by the white cis-het image that you describe. (I think I first heard about the Art Hoe aesthetic in a recent video by Mina Le?) And of course there's Afrofuturism, but like Steampunk if it preceded the creation of the category that is " internet aesthetic" then can it really be a data point in an emergent issue that is the progress of internet aesthetics? Probably not.
My one question to anyone who reads is: are you going to be reading the same type (genre) of book 20 years from now that you now enjoy? Effort doesn't cost anything. Expand your horizons, your empathy, your understanding of your fellow human beings, especially outside of English Language novels. There are a great many translators doing fantastic work in languages all across the globe. So why not give them a try?
First off, so honored to be part of this video ❣ One thing I have been mourning as all of bookstagram has become more commercialized into an aesthetic is the long, intense discussions of books. At the start of 2020, I learned about countless authors who I would have never found otherwise - Alice Munro, Rachel Cusk, Siri Hustvedt, and so many more. None of these recommendations needed to succumb to the confines of a "cool girl reading list" or "sad girl literature" (which if I am being honest all of the classic sad girl novels I have yet to read lol). I never had a literature background and I was taught to appreciate style and prose by consuming countless reviews by fellow bookstgrammers who would rave about authors who had perfected the craft. Now with the ascension of the short-form video I (and others) have lost the motivation to post at length the same type of reviews, but I still have a deep craving for the literary bubble I found online. I know the reading aesthetic will be replaced with something else soon, but I am mostly left questioning how to recreate the same sense of a book community again whether online or in person.
I soooo agree with this! I remember a time when people used to continue their reviews in the comments because the instagram caption wasn't long enough - now, almost nothing!
Yet another interesting video, thank you!! Maybe it's because am older but when I was young (am not a boomer lol) reading as a girl and teen was seen as not cool and a flaw. I read in public and I was bullied by my peers. Am just so happy that young women are finally reading in public, sharing their love of reading with others, and in any aesthetic saying that reading is cool and something they enjoy or even love. It's a shame that people have continued to shun and bully women for what they read and how they interact with a book (annotating was something I did back in the day too). I don't see this massive interest in boy/male readers by the media so why are young women being picked on. At the end of the day young women are talking about books, talking about ideas, talking about the subject matter, or how it relates to their journey into adulthood; and yes, creating a community. What girl didn't want puffy sleeves after reading Anne of Green Gables? Talking to friends now they, like me, wanted puffy sleeves too we just didn't have the internet to share and meet each other. How I would have loved as a teen to have a community who understood my love of Anne's books and my deep need to find a prom dress with puffy sleeves.
Thank you for watching and sharing your perspective. What you say about male readers not being discussed as much is interesting. Could be that the way men online interact with books is different, or it could be that a picture of a man reading a book is not met with the same level of incredulity… for some reason.
Agreed i read most of the time growing up and took books everywhere and i was always ridiculed just for doing something i enjoyed (heaven forbid) i never saw any boys being made fun of but i rarely saw boys reading or being encouraged to read the only male person i knew that read was my grandfather and my dad i don't think a lot of male teens usually have the time even if they have the interests and as soon as i started working i lost both interest and time to read for a long time
The whole concept of 'aesthetic' makes me uncomfortable. Unlike subcultures (based on, well, culture, shared values, political views, etc.), they seem very shallow and easy to reproduce with a few Amazon purchases.
That’s what annoys me so much, too. Everything is being turned into an ‘aesthetic’ right now, and it just feels incredibly shallow. I’ve been a reader my entire life, but now reading, among other things, feels like it’s being donned by people like a coat that’s come back into style purely for the sake of looking a certain way. I know it’ll pass soon enough and another trend will take its place, but at the moment it’s irritating nevertheless.
First of all, thank you for this video. The way you share and present your thoughts is very clear and inspiring! I've been following the internet book community only for the last 2 years, and aesthetics help me to visualize what I'm getting into when buying new books. I try to know as little as possible about the plot beforehand and I also love the vibes that books can create, so I personally think aesthetics are a good way to do that. I'm a man, I mostly follow trends proposed by girls because of the themes in the books (young adult life and love difficulties, introspection, but also excitement for small things), and it bothers me that so many people criticize those aesthetics only because it's mainly women content. (Also why is this type of content created and watched mostly by women?)
I’m not here to make the “book culture has existed forever blah blah” argument, but I wonder why you say the beginning of digital book aesthetic culture started with dark academia, IG etc? Booktube, a visual platform which has alwyas having relied on aesthetics, has been around for at least 10 years, and I remember back when the aesthetic to strive for was fantasy girl/katniss ~core, and other various iterations (think like…Sasha Alsberg). There was also sad girl/emo girl tumblr book aesthetics that predate UA-cam, and I imagine even MySpace had a bookish niche, and of course there were blogs before that! While the last two didn’t have the same broad reach as, say, TikTok, I’d argue early booktube and definitely tumblr were extremely prolific and are part of this evolution of the modern book aesthetic, if not the beginning. I largely agree with all your arguments here, but I think we do a disservice to the conversation or perhaps the legitimacy of the so-called culture by not giving it an even broader historical context!
this is a valid point - I'm referring specifically to book culture in the age social media apps, so mid 2010s onward, but I definitely get where you're coming from and agree that the terminology could be better
16:05 that someone who decided the coquette shelf was a good idea is likely a girl aged 16-21. The coquette signage is clearly printed out and the books hand pulled without regard to space. Probably asked her manager and they gave her a tiny end cap. Just like you said at the end of the video, it’s likely an form of self-expression, reclamation, and search for community. It seems appropriate for a bookish young adult working at a hotspot for other bookish young adults. There are better examples of corporate greed than that singular display. The Popular on Tiktok table with official B&N signage and corporate mandated books strikes me as the most obvious one. The books rotate in and out based on trends.
Aesthetification as core personality categories you must have and adopt is the plague of the internet in general. I've been immersed in online book discourse and content since almost its conception and have never liked the Booktok side because short form videos are simply not suited to ranting and raving about books, Tiktok videos longer than a minute don't do well so everyone has to follow the rules and be snippy and attention grabbing.
Just wanna say I really appreciate this kind of video essay, where a woman discusses issues that are mostly based on the experience of being a woman. I'm a guy so this topic really doesn't apply to me at all, but I've been trying to hear more about women from women in women's spaces where I don't have to inject my opinion, both to learn and to override long held misconceptions and societal falsehoods that I wanna correct. Beyond that though you make some escellent points about the commidfication of trends that apply to damn near everything in marketing.
I like to read in my ratty sweats, unshowered, snacking on M&Ms, on my cat scratched furniture. I find all other reading related aesthetics humorous, entertaining, and good for the book industry. What next - are we going to villainize fresh air?
lmaoooo I'm such a scented candle fan, but yes, it's laughable the way they've become the n.1 reading accessory. And they always have the most annoying names "bibliotheque", "yellowed pages", "bookworm"...
These books are all also white, meaning these trends keep centering white voices over and over again, several from what I've heard include racist inclinations or are written by plainly racist authors. Moreover, by listing books by white authors as the top ones in trends like "Hot girl books" insinuates that in order to be a "Hot girl book" it has to be white. There are so many problematic layers to only promote a certain type of book within all these trends, and the risk of normalizing nonchalance when it comes to racial issues, and other societal problems, is enhanced.
I disagree that the Post-Pandemic Chick Lit is more inclusive than dark academia. It might not put out a hashtag aspiration of prohibitively high tuition fees, but it's still in the Anglophone internet that's accessible through devices. The actual cost to put out a dark academia image or video clip versus a coquette image or video clip is equal, and comes from the same social echelon. Whether dark academia is considered an approach to classics of the Western canon (Dorian Grey, Gatsby), or restricted itself to conventions of a genre (story must take place at a campus and have characters that study too hard and then murder somebody because they study too hard: The Secret History, Babel)-I have found so many more conversations in the dark academia subculture about the need for ethnic diversity, or disability representation, or being aware of class and cultural power so that we know better what to dismantle (even if we don't yet know how)...and the need for gender diversity, which dark academia actually has but it takes a bit of scratching to find it (and we're not as good at researching as we look)... ...compared to Girl Books/Novels/Fiction that I feel like it drops anchor into the port of working through the trauma that is white middle-class ablebodied girlhood. I certainly don't mean to say New Chick Lit is bad-it's absolutely worthwhile to work through and sit with trauma, ennui, and/or the personal impact of the pressures of gender roles. That can be a point of relatability for readers in this Girl Books/Novels/Fiction who aren't white or abled or girls. But I do not find much evidence of Girl Books/Novels/Fiction being actively intersectional, or wanting to be more intersectional or talking about how "we as a reading community need more variety and diversity".
I agree and I think that Pip Finkemeyer quote about middle class women reading about middle class women writing about middle class women is spot on. your comment about the white, able-bodied aspect of it is also valid and I think a lot if the criticism of the "genre" as being nothing more than an exercise in navel-gazing by privileged women is, again, spot on. But I still think that when it comes to reading as a hobby, the elitism surrounding literary fiction remains one of the bigger barriers that keeps people from picking up books for fun. I could be wrong and I appreciate your input on this!!
@@accordingtoalina what I find about something like 19th century literary fiction is that the authors are dead so the text is usually public domain and so the books are cheaper. I think some students only purchase it for assigned readings, they don't love it, they wouldn't re-read it voluntarily so they give it away while decluttering and then I purchase it at a used bookstore or exchange it at a tiny library that's like an unattended bookshelf in the middle of the sidewalk (give a book, take a book). I have made memes of Jane Austen's Sense & Sensibility by riffing on Hamilton lyrics (Elinore, Marianne, and Margaret: the Dashwood sisters); and Clive Durham from E.M. Forster's "Maurice" intercut with the text post from Tumblr of kontextmaschine who caught the COVID-19 that turned him bisexual (because the opposite happened in the book written in 1914...Clive caught a flu that turned him heterosexual upon recovery. I think E.M. Forster did have bisexual friends in real life and was writing from secondhand experience and maybe they trolled him, but that's not the point. There are strange experiences in classic literature that can still be experienced in the 21st century.) I called Edward Rochester from Jane Eyre a "minecraft man" because the book describes him as made out of squares. I have not read Les Miserables or Anna Karenina, but I find similar jokes and memes about its contents. So if it is not the price of the paperback book (even ebooks many classics are less than $1 if not completely free to download, as opposed to $12-$25 contemporary publications)...and it is not the subculture of literary readers making it that the discussions must not use memes or must not use pop music in playlists for favorite characters (because there are memes and pop songs in playlists)... ...then what is the elitism of literary fiction that poses such a barrier? I do not believe it is either of those factors-not cost nor snobbery. The biggest barrier to classic literature that I find is the language itself. These are bygone literary conventions of a sentence that can go on for an entire page (I am exaggerating), as opposed to late 20th century literary Minimalist writers who honed the efficiency and hooks that influence an unobtrusive contemporary style. (Gordon Lish, Tom Spanbauer, Amy Hempel.) What I found in communities of classic literature readers was the acknowledgement that the language might take some getting used to, and many unexamined biases of authors and characters deserve criticism-but ultimately that the content is worth it. Readers found something to love about the story, and they make memes and playlists and illustrations and essays about a specific part of the story that churns some thoughts about their own lives. I also do not encounter classic lit readers being exclusively classic lit readers. Somebody can read Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan AND The Histories by Herodotus, maybe even reading one is what led to wanting to read the other even if the connection is not obvious or even if it apparently disrupts some "image" of what type of reading a reader does. But then I am not on TikTok or Twitter. Maybe the classic lit snobs are there, who hate memes, and hate favorite character playlists that include Taylor Swift songs, and who don't believe that a serious reader of Herodotus' Histories should ever read Percy Jackson books or Miller's Song of Achilles?
@@accordingtoalina I also wanted to add a distinction between "dark academia" as an approach to reading or hashtagging life goals (classic literature and poetry, close readings, cafés for some reason) versus the genre of dark academia. In something like A Separate Peace by John Knowles, two boarding school boys are supposed to be friends but one sabotages the other so terribly that he is injured and can no longer be an athlete or join the army during World War 2. I find this book invites conversations about masculinity conditioning and disability: Why was this victimized character's aspirations "athlete" or "soldier", so much that it ruined his life and sense of self that he would not grow up to be either of those things? Others who have read A Separate Peace might be more interested in the character motivations of the one doing the sabotaging, and how to continue living with regrets that cannot be undone. That book was not marketed as "dark academia", because the genre did not exist at the time of its publication, but it has many features that qualify it as that genre and I described the different relationships to this text that I think of as a lifestyle/subculture "dark academia" approach to a work that is now in the "dark academia" genre. Fraternity by Andy Mientus and Babel by R.F. Kuang I suspect were both purposely marketed as dark academia, and the stories do deal with queerness and race. Babel fans are outraged at the Hugo Awards scandal, of course, or at least I am. So when the genre gets criticized by readers for classism, whitewashing, or an imbalance in gender representation in characters as well as who gets to be a lauded favorite author...I have witnessed actual progress within the content and the discourse, and of these issues getting addressed. I don't find that same commitment to progress in the communities and subculture surrounding Girl Fiction.
Having interesting life was possible mostly for men. They got to travel, go to war, get education. But women writing from "the rooms of their own" are another category of timeless authors, some of them lived extremely isolated life and were writing in spite of it
3:23 is a picture of my old school and it's so funny to see people romanticising it all over the internet 😭it's literally some guys being late to chapel
I think George Eliot's Silly Novels by Lady Novelists (and for the record she did not call the lady novelists silly) is more apt than you give credit for. Though, in terms of modern literature that is in the full tradition of what she terms "silly novels" the Saga genre takes that cake by a mile. I'm not sure to what extent I agree with it as an essay. I can see why she wrote it, but are her conclusions correct? I am not sure.
I honestly just think the vast majority of criticism is sexism. 'Millenial women reading millennial women' - well I went to college to read English and that was all millennial women reading old dead privileged colonial men. 'Chic lit' has been bashed for decades. This feels no difference tbh!
Well they can - and probably should be silly in the way that every artist should be able to also exist in the realm of imagination and whimsy. I’m referring specifically to the use of “silly” in the context of that article, which is specifically derogatory, to mean stupid, dumb or otherwise inept. And anyone who has ever tried to write and publish a book will know that it does require *some* degree of skill and know-how, even for lowbrow genres.
I see that the mob wife trend has recycled. Jackie Collins wrote the Lucky Santangelo novels beginning in 1981.TikTok is another layering of the reading aesthetics. We often forget that books are a form of technology and an aesthetic. Is reading genres such as romance or fantasy a choice for the reader to use as escapism? Is the reader choosing? Is it there to dull the senses of the masses? Books can be used to help shape people's thinking. I think of other forms of media, such as theater, films, and other art forms. The people behind in making decisions of what we see and hear. Social media is another tool by which people create algorithms and make decisions. And those people come with their biases and worldviews. A book I viewed on Amazon will appear on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and UA-cam. Better yet, if I do a Google search. It's not necessarily an ad; it would be another person's feed or a video about the same book or similar books.
Alina! Ever been on Pinterest? Hot dudes reading are all over the place. Nevertheless, your opinions always have been interesting since the Dante reading.
the gendering of books really bothers me...the whole "cool girl" "hot girl" lingo feels really alienating as a non-binary person. i just don't see the point in labeling books as for a certain gender, it feels so reductive and like, counter productive. i just feel sad and weird seeing this kind of gendered language with literature as someone who doesn't identify with one. i understand if it's a list of books *about* girls, but that doesn't mean it's only *for* girls. it's just so odd to me that binary gendered language has been increasingly used in online communities the last couple of years. also all this "cool girl" bs is super grounded in whiteness as well lol it's all a mess
One of the things i really don't like is that we never really get to see an MC who's not female. I'm female, bi & was always a little tomboyish so i relate to any or all MCs or atleast want to get their point of view. Why is every MC a female who's between the ages of 17-30? Why can't a "hot girl book" be about a 75 year old grandpa ( who's not dying lmao) . The lack of perspectives really irks me.
Come on Alina, don’t be a coward. You called out Joe Rogan and I’m giving some push-back. Answer my questions. Everyone gets a heart but the dangerous scary-question guy. You said it, defend it. Be real.
There’s nothing to defend, there are countless articles and youtube videos breaking down every sensationalist theory he has brought forth and which was subsequently debunked, especially at the height of the pandemic. My choice in not responding to your initial comment has nothing to do with cowardice, it’s rather a case of spending my time and energy on comments that are actually engaging with the topic of the video.
it is completely fine to ask! I've decided to put the book club on ice for the time being because I was finding it difficult to balance the workload. I have a couple of health issues that got more complicated last year and I'm still figuring out how much work I can do compared to even just two years ago. Since the book club was a complete passion project, it was sadly the one thing I could let go of without it affecting me financially. I've unlisted the videos because I didn't want new people to find them and then be disappointed to see they suddenly stopped, but I shared a link to them all in my newsletter (see the about me section on my channel), so you can rewatch them that way if you wanted to double check something. I also still have all my Inferno and Purgatorio newsletters up and free for everyone, if you want to read them
@@accordingtoalinaThanks for sharing where they can be accessed. Indeed this is a great passion project you have taken up and it shows! Made me finally access a book that has been lying in my shelf for a while. Wishing you a speedy recovery! 🙏🏽
I’m so glad to hear you’re reading in without me and thank you for the kind words! I know a lot of people got really excited for the book club and I was very sad to disappoint everyone. Sending you the best also ❤
I'm hooking you all up with toys! Everyone who enters my giveaway will win a free toy or gift card: www.bboutique.co/vibe/accordingtoalina-yt
"why do we have to bring sexiness into everything that women are interested in" thank you for the great quote!
Same, i just want to be the nerd emoji 🤓
but its women themselves who say that
@@choucrouttemansaucissux so then it's worth wondering why women feel the need to do so
i just wish there was more discussion of the actual content of books in online communities. booktok just feels like watching a slideshow of pretty or iconic book covers. of course the medium of short-form video encourages this kind of visual engagement. it would be nice if we encouraged more book-club style discussion that actually builds a community of readers rather than a collection of images.
i know online book clubs exist, but they’re just not the dominant form of literary social media
That's why i prefer getting book recommendations from booktube. Booktok is a fun way to see what others read and what not but if I want to actually know what a book is about I'm coming to UA-cam
@clairherrington6328 They exist on Facebook, which has 3 billion users, and TikTok has 1.58 billion users. Facebook is still number one on the social media platforms UA-cam, WhatsApp, Instagram, and TikTok are behind respectively. People who run online book clubs use multiple platforms to drive people to the book clubs. People create channels on Discord. You're right they exist and aren't dominant, but they probably will grow with time.
For all I know (because I'm not on the TikTok), the short form leads to recognizing shared casual interests that can be taken to Discord servers or blogs, group chats, or other social media.
While I've read some of the core coquette canon mentioned (The Virgin Suicides, Lolita, The Bell Jar-as well as Girl, Interrupted that I have caught mentioned often in hashtags where I do go, but I don't know if it's canon) I have not noticed much "book club" type discussion questions about them...but that's probably because I'm not SUCH a big fan of those specific titles that I need to talk about them with people. But I am also thinking that maybe there are discussions about the literary techniques and themes, or maybe it doesn't "need" discussion amongst people in this specific bookish subculture because each reader's relationship to the book is so personal...so there's mostly no words, only vibes, because when I read Girl, Interrupted then I was not in a communicative era of my life either. It doesn't mean readers are not getting meaningfully impacted by a story, only because they don't want to talk about narrative devices or historical context or characterization.
Maybe it's a different conversation surrounding the disaster girlboss types of stories? (My limitations are the same. I have read a Gillian Flynn book and I thought it was interesting but did not love it enough to fall in with others who read and love Gillian Flynn books, to find out if the stereotype mentioned/quoted in the video is true about vapid interactions with "heavy" themes...and that's crime fiction, anyway, rather than the more broadly appealing portrait of a mess of a millennial woman. Maybe there is more scattershot, grassroots sharing of reader sentiments about it...instead of the register we would get with like guided questions for a Book Club.)
no need to clarify, I 100% get what you're saying here! I ran a book club for a couple of years and it was one of the most gratifying experiences of the past few years. Interestingly, there were around 1000 people participating in the book club each week (it took place via newsletter, so I could see how many people opened the emails) but whenever I posted a picture of the book on Instagram to let people know the newsletter had been sent, that post got between 5 and 10k likes - sometimes even 20k+. So there's definitely a disconnect here. There's a disproportionate demographic who loves to consume the idea of reading, comparing to the number of people actually engaging in the reading...
the comment about "why does sexiness have to be in everything women are interested in" needs a whole separate video because girl!! I don't want reading to be sexy pls I just want to enjoy a book
What i dislike is that these trends present themselves as from girls for girls but they're really just about a certain type of girl. Girl who dates men, who seemingly stands out but not to the point its revolting to general society, who is confused in life but has enough money to stay confused instead of needing to be occupied just to stay alive. They have money, they at least seem heteronormative, they are special without being too special to the point where it's shunned by society. It's not feminist and groundbreaking and encompassing the "girlhood experience", it's just a book written by a woman. It doesn't have to be those special things, but those labels keep being thrown on it, isolating those of us who already hardly fit in into society's idea of womanhood.
I concur. It's perfectly fine as a NICHE, readers are going to find and like what they read at the time of their life that it's exactly what they personally need... but as a TREND especially one described as "more inclusive"-I do not think that is true at all. It's not more inclusive.
I agree, there's a type of girl that is represented in these communities and it can feel discouraging when you're trying to be on booktok when all the books being suggested are clearly for a specific type of girl
exactly! also, i understand that everyone needs a community and it makes sense to make it "gendered", but not only do these trends segregate other marginalized individuals, but they also make it a bit weird for the non-conforming folks. when you revolve all of your interests around gender, soon enough we'll have the same problems we've been facing for decades, alienating girls and boys who don't fit the standards. the "not like other girls" girls are coming back slowly but surely because these manufactured ideas of "girlhood" are strongly coming back when it's so important to talk about how gender essentialism wounds us as a society, but especially those who are hurt by patriarchy. and what's even worse right now, compared to years prior, is that if you try to point out that contradiction, you're being misogynistic.
this is a valid point and I would have liked to add a note about the fact that the vast majority of the protagonists here are able-bodied/ traditionally attractive but that might be another video in itself!
Because to write a book on the types of women you described, is to create a product that's hardly gonna sell. People might feel like oddballs simply for being a little quirky in high school so they feel different, though in reality they're not really that weird - but people who are truly weird (think people who enjoy Doctor Who) are a very small minority of the world. As for queer experiences there is plenty of modern books on that bc queer characters have been on the rise and another common trend. The Sad Girl novel is just a different niche, it makes no sense to compare the two unless you specifically wanted a sad girls novel with a queer character. To make a sad girl novel where the character isn't financially privileged is to create art that's too realistic, therefore depressing. Most people look into books for escapism, and to resolve a broke sad girl's issues takes more effort or maybe even suspense of beliefs. People will be more likely to critique the afromentioned, because of it was that easy to get a job or get out of a slump, why don't people do it by the thousands? By focusing on world out of the common reader's grasp, helps evade such criticism. Just my speculation.
It's also possible, that most of sad girl novels are written by traditionally published authors, which is usually an already privileged demographic, hence why they write from that perspective. You rarely see people in traditional media spaces who have the life experience of the regular person or who's gone through poverty
Books feel like that one purchase/product that you don't have to feel bad for indulging in because they have a general positive connotation. I think that indulging in amassing a large collection of books that felt less frivolous than shoes or clothes because it signified higher intellectual pursuits.
But one thing people, especially people online like to do is judge women. Women can never just have an interest; it has to be her 'faking' it or to appeal to men.
I mean I don't necessarily agree with that sentiment. I think that amassing a large collection of books just to have books rather than to read them is just as bad as purchasing a bunch of shoes or clothes and never wearing them. There are people online, mainly the popular women booktubers/booktokers/bookinstagramers who have huge shelves filled with books but would note that they have only read like 100/600 books on their shelves. That is just adding to environmental impacts since there is a lot that goes into printing books and whatnot. It is just wasteful for them to keep buying trendy books and to flash their bookshelves without actually appreciating the privilege it is to buy and read books. I don't necessarily think it comes down to people "judging women just to judge women" but it is rather calling them out for pretty much participating in the book version of fast fashion.
@@stephanieblack2114while you're not wrong regarding the overconsumption, two things can be true at the same time. The biggest book hoarder I've seen online is Jack Edwards who's obviously not a woman and I don't see anyone calling him out. Besides, I'm not sure how many people collect books and *never* read them. The majority probably do it, but slowly. It objectively takes less time to buy a book than to read it, while both can be pleasant experiences. We can condemn promoting overcosumption online and at the same time obstain from making assumptions that women who buy a lot of books don't read them and only do that to show off. That might be the case with some, but unlikely to be the general rule.
@@justwonder1404
Same. I don't believe MOST people on this planet hoard books and not read them.
my two cents on why the hot girl/cool girl/sad girl book lists are all the SAME books is that it takes time to read new books, and the trend cycle is much faster than the time it takes a normal person to read say, ten books for a new list for a new aesthetic. so these accounts who have read boy parts or whatever have to reuse that book for multiple posts with different angles to keep the content mill churning. i prefer booktube channels like this that go more indepth on a topic over booktok/bookstagram accounts that reuse the same books for content over and over
That’s a good point, actually, although I think there’s also a lost of overlap in themes between the various trends and books are inherently complex things. I’ve never come across a good book that was just one thing
What really bothers me is how corporate so many of these books are. A ton of people use reading as an escape from the capitalist world we're in, but a lot of these books are there just for the cash grab of it all. There are so many corporate romance books that booktok is devouring, and i find it so strange how all these books are so cookie cutter copy and paste. And it reminds me a lot of the over consumption that happens outside of books because of tiktok, for example Stanley Cups. It's like these books have become fun new items and the contents don't truly matter, the aesthetic of owning so many books does. That just feeds right into rich business peoples pockets. it's just smth that has always irked me.
I never understood buying books fro the purpose of not reading them.
That’s a very good point !!
We should also talk about the over-consumption of books that comes with these trends. It's one thing to read those books and enjoy them, and a whole other thing to buy every single book that is trending at the moment just so you can post pictures/reels of them online to creat a bookish persona.
I have a video on that too!!
People do not use libraries enough! They constantly want new books instead of waiting a little for them to get to their local library, which saves so much money and is way easier because if you don't like the book, you can just return it. My mom was recently at the library getting a book and she found out that shes saved around five thousand dollars on books by borrowing them in the last sixteen years that shes been using that library.
I'd like to apply for the job of picking books for celebs to be photographed with.
same! I'd be sending them out on the streets with the wildest titles
@@accordingtoalina It just came to my mind that time Grimes hired a paparazzi and went out with the Communist Manifesto THAT WAS WILD
"Name a more controversial book than Lolita" girl does not know about Marquis de Sade. And I hope she never has to
Don’t give them ideas!!
Lolita had the unreliable narrator device to make a point about who gets taken in by erudition despite all the horror between the lines that what is happening is wrong.
Angela Carter asserted that Juliette by the Marquis de Sade showed an awareness of the oppression and exploitation of women...but I stopped reading after the man forced his wife to eat somebody else's vomit (not that the early part of the book at the nunnery wasn't horrific. It was, but I thought I should read the whole thing to criticize it and then pointless violence continued until I got worn down.)
But still, 120 Days of Sodom partially inspired Dennis Cooper's no-holds-barred explorations/subversions of "the gay serial killer pederast" stereotype that I do often find some heart to it and an actual point in all the De Sade influenced gruesomeness. (I have read Frisk and Cooper's short story collection titled Wrong.) Even if De Sade himself didn't necessarily have a point in these salacious, depraved libertine novels. Also inspired Pier Paolo Pasolini's movie "Salo" (don't know how to make the accent on this keyboard) that was a protest against fascism.
I even caught an allusion to De Sade in Down A Dark Hall by Lois Duncan, even though De Sade was not named I admit to a spark of pride that I could recognize the reference, and how that quickly turned into a real horror for the sake of the characters at the implications of the story.
Making the Marquis de Sade "trendy and controversial" might be a good thing for broader discussions-but as a broader society that would be having those discussions we are...probably not there yet. Heck, I am still personally working on forgiving Angela Carter for casually putting out in an Oprah magazine featurette that Juliette as a book was good actually. (Half-joking. Grr, Angela Carter..."top 10 anime betrayals"...)
Silently adds to tbr
the term "celebrity book stylist" had me pausing this video to scream into the void.
Sorry to bring it to your attention
I love how your videos always make me rethink whatever POV I might have on a situation. I think it's so easy to get carried away with the blame train and disregard how everything has deeper roots. I appreciate the depth of your research!! much love
I hope one day non-fiction becomes popular in booktok. There are a lot of amazing stories that happen in the real world too and would perhaps be a refreshing change of pace.
Any recommendations?
I need recommendations too because all the none fictions people have told me to read so far are...depressing. Idk why I was surprised since the real world often is.
also want to echo these replies - give us recs pls!!!
@@aisling_90 I recently finished Braiding Sweetgrass and Gathering Moss by Robin Kimmerer. She's a Potawatomi moss ecologist who can artfully intertwine native heritage and scientific literature. Reading her feels like drinking warm soup to me. I'm currently reading Spare Parts: Four Undocumented Teenagers, One Ugly Robot, and the Battle for the American Dream by Joshua Davis. I'm not finished with it yet but I can already tell it's going to stick with me in a positive way. I also read The Final Forest by William Dietrich over the holidays and I was amazed by how thorough his investigative journalism was. The fight over Olympic National Forest can be depressing for sure, but he really looked at every side of the issue and actually learning more about lumbermen helped me feel a lot more connected to them. With how biased current news is, I felt truly touched by his craft. The harvesting of that old growth forest was pretty much a full blown war and when I look at old pictures from that time, I'm so touched by how fiercely people defended it and continue to defend it. I hope you find any one of those intriguing!
@er6113 I'm not the OP so sorry for butting in, but I really enjoyed Free by Lea Ypi it's a coming of age memoir which takes place around the fall of communism in Albania. It's about growing up in totalitarian society, family history and political turmoil I really enjoyed it.
A history of the World in 100 objects, I loved this book, it's just amazing, it does what it says on the tin, its history book that tells the story of humanity through objects that were, made, used and loved by people throughout history, not the just the 'great and the good' but everyone. The chapters are self contained, so you can just skip parts that don't interest you, social and material history is really interesting, and shows that history is not just about battles, politics, class warfare, economic trends ect. but about people, who lived and breathed like us, and how they lived their life.
I used to study classics, so I would recommend anything by Mary Beard she's amazing and makes Roman history really accessible, if you're not massively into classics, then Women and Power a Manifesto is a really good short read.
The Ark Before Noah, by Irving Finkel, Irving Finkel is my spirit animal haha, this is a really interesting read, which shows that the story of Abrahamic religions had a long history in the Levant and Mesopotamia long before, biblical texts ect. IMesopotamia.. Irving Finkel also has a diaries project which is really cool, and collects diaries of everyday individuals into a larger collection, I hope something is published from this someday :)
I know it's been recommended to death but, I really enjoyed A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Stories in Our Genes by Adam Rutherford, I'm not a science guy haha, but I really enjoyed this, it traces developments in our genetics, what this tells about how humanity developed.
I don't read a lot of non fiction tbh, I'm more of fiction guy, but I did really enjoy these.
Having this up on a stand as I listen along at work, the advertisement was the last thing I expected to listen too and have shown to the kitchen 🤣
Guess I agree that books have become a casualty of the identity rush you see online, but I still don't know how widespread that is irl outside of the US/UK. Regardless of the aesthetics motivation and its part in it though, I can't help but feel glad seeing new bookstores being opened in Kyiv despite the war and filled with young people. On the other side, the critique of book overconsumption, despite having valid points, will probably always have some notes of misogyny and snobbery, there's no getting away from that in the nearest future🙄
so nice to hear about the Kyiv bookshops!
Book trends, like all trends, come and go and will cycle for eternity, dependent on highly subjective reasoning - popularity, marketing, supply, etc. I think too the reader herself cycles through her own trends. For example, I just got out of a massive classics trend and am now gravitating toward more contemporary literary fiction. I've had moments where all I want to read are romance, all I want to read is YA Scifi/paranormal, etc. etc. I also think this discourse tends to only settle around female readers. Nobody talks about how men only really read from a few genres, that they're all reading practically the same handful of books, that they stop reading after childhood because there is a hole in the Male YA canon, and how men feel like they run out of options and are forced to settle on non-fiction by adulthood because they're not successfully marketed to in the same way women readers are (IK IK Poor men!!!! /snark)
Not sure about the last part being sarcastic or not so I'll take it as good faith and agree i can find 50 ya books focused on girls and girl things before i find a guy ya and I've read a few i feel like they are more prevalent in middle grade when boys still have time to read
idk if this is the right video or context to say this but one thing i've noticed is that all these 'aesthetic' trends seem to be so so focussed on white heterosexual (or heteronormative) women. i've yet to see a book by a bipoc or queer author be featured in these aeethetics and tbh, it's a thing i've noticed in the romance reading circles as well. idk if that is why i feel so alienated towards this digital 'bookish culture' but i would really appreciate it if someone did a video on this too.
this is a great point and definitely appropriate for this comment section! will add this to my list of video ideas, although I am white and straight, so not sure I'm the best person to speak on it...
R.F. Kuang's book "Babel", and Andy Mientus's book "Fraternity" were marketed as genre dark academia. Andrew Joseph White's book The Spirit Bares Its Teeth also looks very interesting to me.
While not necessarily bookish, I heard the Art Hoe aesthetic was a decolonialization and anti-racism initiative aimed at recontextualizing fine arts and paintings...that became overwhelmed by the white cis-het image that you describe. (I think I first heard about the Art Hoe aesthetic in a recent video by Mina Le?)
And of course there's Afrofuturism, but like Steampunk if it preceded the creation of the category that is " internet aesthetic" then can it really be a data point in an emergent issue that is the progress of internet aesthetics? Probably not.
Legend and lattes needs to be featured on a cottagecore book aesthetic for sure 😊
My one question to anyone who reads is: are you going to be reading the same type (genre) of book 20 years from now that you now enjoy? Effort doesn't cost anything. Expand your horizons, your empathy, your understanding of your fellow human beings, especially outside of English Language novels. There are a great many translators doing fantastic work in languages all across the globe. So why not give them a try?
First off, so honored to be part of this video ❣ One thing I have been mourning as all of bookstagram has become more commercialized into an aesthetic is the long, intense discussions of books. At the start of 2020, I learned about countless authors who I would have never found otherwise - Alice Munro, Rachel Cusk, Siri Hustvedt, and so many more. None of these recommendations needed to succumb to the confines of a "cool girl reading list" or "sad girl literature" (which if I am being honest all of the classic sad girl novels I have yet to read lol). I never had a literature background and I was taught to appreciate style and prose by consuming countless reviews by fellow bookstgrammers who would rave about authors who had perfected the craft. Now with the ascension of the short-form video I (and others) have lost the motivation to post at length the same type of reviews, but I still have a deep craving for the literary bubble I found online. I know the reading aesthetic will be replaced with something else soon, but I am mostly left questioning how to recreate the same sense of a book community again whether online or in person.
I soooo agree with this! I remember a time when people used to continue their reviews in the comments because the instagram caption wasn't long enough - now, almost nothing!
I didn't even know about cool books. The book community is such a interesting place.
Truly!! Could talk about it for hours… and kind of have lol
Yet another interesting video, thank you!! Maybe it's because am older but when I was young (am not a boomer lol) reading as a girl and teen was seen as not cool and a flaw. I read in public and I was bullied by my peers. Am just so happy that young women are finally reading in public, sharing their love of reading with others, and in any aesthetic saying that reading is cool and something they enjoy or even love. It's a shame that people have continued to shun and bully women for what they read and how they interact with a book (annotating was something I did back in the day too). I don't see this massive interest in boy/male readers by the media so why are young women being picked on. At the end of the day young women are talking about books, talking about ideas, talking about the subject matter, or how it relates to their journey into adulthood; and yes, creating a community. What girl didn't want puffy sleeves after reading Anne of Green Gables? Talking to friends now they, like me, wanted puffy sleeves too we just didn't have the internet to share and meet each other. How I would have loved as a teen to have a community who understood my love of Anne's books and my deep need to find a prom dress with puffy sleeves.
Thank you for watching and sharing your perspective. What you say about male readers not being discussed as much is interesting. Could be that the way men online interact with books is different, or it could be that a picture of a man reading a book is not met with the same level of incredulity… for some reason.
Agreed i read most of the time growing up and took books everywhere and i was always ridiculed just for doing something i enjoyed (heaven forbid) i never saw any boys being made fun of but i rarely saw boys reading or being encouraged to read the only male person i knew that read was my grandfather and my dad i don't think a lot of male teens usually have the time even if they have the interests and as soon as i started working i lost both interest and time to read for a long time
The whole concept of 'aesthetic' makes me uncomfortable. Unlike subcultures (based on, well, culture, shared values, political views, etc.), they seem very shallow and easy to reproduce with a few Amazon purchases.
That’s what annoys me so much, too. Everything is being turned into an ‘aesthetic’ right now, and it just feels incredibly shallow.
I’ve been a reader my entire life, but now reading, among other things, feels like it’s being donned by people like a coat that’s come back into style purely for the sake of looking a certain way.
I know it’ll pass soon enough and another trend will take its place, but at the moment it’s irritating nevertheless.
First of all, thank you for this video. The way you share and present your thoughts is very clear and inspiring!
I've been following the internet book community only for the last 2 years, and aesthetics help me to visualize what I'm getting into when buying new books. I try to know as little as possible about the plot beforehand and I also love the vibes that books can create, so I personally think aesthetics are a good way to do that.
I'm a man, I mostly follow trends proposed by girls because of the themes in the books (young adult life and love difficulties, introspection, but also excitement for small things), and it bothers me that so many people criticize those aesthetics only because it's mainly women content. (Also why is this type of content created and watched mostly by women?)
I’m not here to make the “book culture has existed forever blah blah” argument, but I wonder why you say the beginning of digital book aesthetic culture started with dark academia, IG etc? Booktube, a visual platform which has alwyas having relied on aesthetics, has been around for at least 10 years, and I remember back when the aesthetic to strive for was fantasy girl/katniss ~core, and other various iterations (think like…Sasha Alsberg).
There was also sad girl/emo girl tumblr book aesthetics that predate UA-cam, and I imagine even MySpace had a bookish niche, and of course there were blogs before that! While the last two didn’t have the same broad reach as, say, TikTok, I’d argue early booktube and definitely tumblr were extremely prolific and are part of this evolution of the modern book aesthetic, if not the beginning. I largely agree with all your arguments here, but I think we do a disservice to the conversation or perhaps the legitimacy of the so-called culture by not giving it an even broader historical context!
this is a valid point - I'm referring specifically to book culture in the age social media apps, so mid 2010s onward, but I definitely get where you're coming from and agree that the terminology could be better
16:05 that someone who decided the coquette shelf was a good idea is likely a girl aged 16-21. The coquette signage is clearly printed out and the books hand pulled without regard to space. Probably asked her manager and they gave her a tiny end cap. Just like you said at the end of the video, it’s likely an form of self-expression, reclamation, and search for community. It seems appropriate for a bookish young adult working at a hotspot for other bookish young adults. There are better examples of corporate greed than that singular display.
The Popular on Tiktok table with official B&N signage and corporate mandated books strikes me as the most obvious one. The books rotate in and out based on trends.
I wonder how many of these trends and sub-genres were invented in marketing rooms of publishers and pushed into TikTok.
Gotta say putting speak on to the coquette display is a bold choice
Aesthetification as core personality categories you must have and adopt is the plague of the internet in general. I've been immersed in online book discourse and content since almost its conception and have never liked the Booktok side because short form videos are simply not suited to ranting and raving about books, Tiktok videos longer than a minute don't do well so everyone has to follow the rules and be snippy and attention grabbing.
Just wanna say I really appreciate this kind of video essay, where a woman discusses issues that are mostly based on the experience of being a woman. I'm a guy so this topic really doesn't apply to me at all, but I've been trying to hear more about women from women in women's spaces where I don't have to inject my opinion, both to learn and to override long held misconceptions and societal falsehoods that I wanna correct. Beyond that though you make some escellent points about the commidfication of trends that apply to damn near everything in marketing.
OMG CAN NOT WAIT TO WATCH THIS AFTER I FINISH MY WRITING HEHE
I like to read in my ratty sweats, unshowered, snacking on M&Ms, on my cat scratched furniture. I find all other reading related aesthetics humorous, entertaining, and good for the book industry. What next - are we going to villainize fresh air?
speaking of fresh air, there were scented candles in 90% of the reading vlogs I've watched this month!
lmaoooo I'm such a scented candle fan, but yes, it's laughable the way they've become the n.1 reading accessory. And they always have the most annoying names "bibliotheque", "yellowed pages", "bookworm"...
These books are all also white, meaning these trends keep centering white voices over and over again, several from what I've heard include racist inclinations or are written by plainly racist authors. Moreover, by listing books by white authors as the top ones in trends like "Hot girl books" insinuates that in order to be a "Hot girl book" it has to be white. There are so many problematic layers to only promote a certain type of book within all these trends, and the risk of normalizing nonchalance when it comes to racial issues, and other societal problems, is enhanced.
I disagree that the Post-Pandemic Chick Lit is more inclusive than dark academia. It might not put out a hashtag aspiration of prohibitively high tuition fees, but it's still in the Anglophone internet that's accessible through devices. The actual cost to put out a dark academia image or video clip versus a coquette image or video clip is equal, and comes from the same social echelon.
Whether dark academia is considered an approach to classics of the Western canon (Dorian Grey, Gatsby), or restricted itself to conventions of a genre (story must take place at a campus and have characters that study too hard and then murder somebody because they study too hard: The Secret History, Babel)-I have found so many more conversations in the dark academia subculture about the need for ethnic diversity, or disability representation, or being aware of class and cultural power so that we know better what to dismantle (even if we don't yet know how)...and the need for gender diversity, which dark academia actually has but it takes a bit of scratching to find it (and we're not as good at researching as we look)...
...compared to Girl Books/Novels/Fiction that I feel like it drops anchor into the port of working through the trauma that is white middle-class ablebodied girlhood.
I certainly don't mean to say New Chick Lit is bad-it's absolutely worthwhile to work through and sit with trauma, ennui, and/or the personal impact of the pressures of gender roles. That can be a point of relatability for readers in this Girl Books/Novels/Fiction who aren't white or abled or girls.
But I do not find much evidence of Girl Books/Novels/Fiction being actively intersectional, or wanting to be more intersectional or talking about how "we as a reading community need more variety and diversity".
I agree and I think that Pip Finkemeyer quote about middle class women reading about middle class women writing about middle class women is spot on. your comment about the white, able-bodied aspect of it is also valid and I think a lot if the criticism of the "genre" as being nothing more than an exercise in navel-gazing by privileged women is, again, spot on. But I still think that when it comes to reading as a hobby, the elitism surrounding literary fiction remains one of the bigger barriers that keeps people from picking up books for fun. I could be wrong and I appreciate your input on this!!
@@accordingtoalina what I find about something like 19th century literary fiction is that the authors are dead so the text is usually public domain and so the books are cheaper. I think some students only purchase it for assigned readings, they don't love it, they wouldn't re-read it voluntarily so they give it away while decluttering and then I purchase it at a used bookstore or exchange it at a tiny library that's like an unattended bookshelf in the middle of the sidewalk (give a book, take a book).
I have made memes of Jane Austen's Sense & Sensibility by riffing on Hamilton lyrics (Elinore, Marianne, and Margaret: the Dashwood sisters); and Clive Durham from E.M. Forster's "Maurice" intercut with the text post from Tumblr of kontextmaschine who caught the COVID-19 that turned him bisexual (because the opposite happened in the book written in 1914...Clive caught a flu that turned him heterosexual upon recovery. I think E.M. Forster did have bisexual friends in real life and was writing from secondhand experience and maybe they trolled him, but that's not the point. There are strange experiences in classic literature that can still be experienced in the 21st century.) I called Edward Rochester from Jane Eyre a "minecraft man" because the book describes him as made out of squares.
I have not read Les Miserables or Anna Karenina, but I find similar jokes and memes about its contents.
So if it is not the price of the paperback book (even ebooks many classics are less than $1 if not completely free to download, as opposed to $12-$25 contemporary publications)...and it is not the subculture of literary readers making it that the discussions must not use memes or must not use pop music in playlists for favorite characters (because there are memes and pop songs in playlists)...
...then what is the elitism of literary fiction that poses such a barrier? I do not believe it is either of those factors-not cost nor snobbery.
The biggest barrier to classic literature that I find is the language itself. These are bygone literary conventions of a sentence that can go on for an entire page (I am exaggerating), as opposed to late 20th century literary Minimalist writers who honed the efficiency and hooks that influence an unobtrusive contemporary style. (Gordon Lish, Tom Spanbauer, Amy Hempel.)
What I found in communities of classic literature readers was the acknowledgement that the language might take some getting used to, and many unexamined biases of authors and characters deserve criticism-but ultimately that the content is worth it. Readers found something to love about the story, and they make memes and playlists and illustrations and essays about a specific part of the story that churns some thoughts about their own lives.
I also do not encounter classic lit readers being exclusively classic lit readers. Somebody can read Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan AND The Histories by Herodotus, maybe even reading one is what led to wanting to read the other even if the connection is not obvious or even if it apparently disrupts some "image" of what type of reading a reader does.
But then I am not on TikTok or Twitter. Maybe the classic lit snobs are there, who hate memes, and hate favorite character playlists that include Taylor Swift songs, and who don't believe that a serious reader of Herodotus' Histories should ever read Percy Jackson books or Miller's Song of Achilles?
@@accordingtoalina I also wanted to add a distinction between "dark academia" as an approach to reading or hashtagging life goals (classic literature and poetry, close readings, cafés for some reason) versus the genre of dark academia.
In something like A Separate Peace by John Knowles, two boarding school boys are supposed to be friends but one sabotages the other so terribly that he is injured and can no longer be an athlete or join the army during World War 2. I find this book invites conversations about masculinity conditioning and disability: Why was this victimized character's aspirations "athlete" or "soldier", so much that it ruined his life and sense of self that he would not grow up to be either of those things? Others who have read A Separate Peace might be more interested in the character motivations of the one doing the sabotaging, and how to continue living with regrets that cannot be undone.
That book was not marketed as "dark academia", because the genre did not exist at the time of its publication, but it has many features that qualify it as that genre and I described the different relationships to this text that I think of as a lifestyle/subculture "dark academia" approach to a work that is now in the "dark academia" genre.
Fraternity by Andy Mientus and Babel by R.F. Kuang I suspect were both purposely marketed as dark academia, and the stories do deal with queerness and race. Babel fans are outraged at the Hugo Awards scandal, of course, or at least I am.
So when the genre gets criticized by readers for classism, whitewashing, or an imbalance in gender representation in characters as well as who gets to be a lauded favorite author...I have witnessed actual progress within the content and the discourse, and of these issues getting addressed.
I don't find that same commitment to progress in the communities and subculture surrounding Girl Fiction.
don’t forget the “weird” girl books/aesthetic lol
stop how did I not come across this??
Having interesting life was possible mostly for men. They got to travel, go to war, get education. But women writing from "the rooms of their own" are another category of timeless authors, some of them lived extremely isolated life and were writing in spite of it
3:23 is a picture of my old school and it's so funny to see people romanticising it all over the internet 😭it's literally some guys being late to chapel
Another brilliant video. The original coquette girl is very cute :) I'm still digesting the idea of a book stylist lol....
thank you for watching!! the book stylist thing is a lot to take in, I agree
I think George Eliot's Silly Novels by Lady Novelists (and for the record she did not call the lady novelists silly) is more apt than you give credit for. Though, in terms of modern literature that is in the full tradition of what she terms "silly novels" the Saga genre takes that cake by a mile.
I'm not sure to what extent I agree with it as an essay. I can see why she wrote it, but are her conclusions correct? I am not sure.
I honestly just think the vast majority of criticism is sexism. 'Millenial women reading millennial women' - well I went to college to read English and that was all millennial women reading old dead privileged colonial men. 'Chic lit' has been bashed for decades. This feels no difference tbh!
The only man I've told about my hobbies is my dad 😅
can you hook the guys up with like remote controlled cars or something lol?
Hahahaha I’ll look into it!
Why can't a novelist be silly, regardless of what books they write?
Well they can - and probably should be silly in the way that every artist should be able to also exist in the realm of imagination and whimsy. I’m referring specifically to the use of “silly” in the context of that article, which is specifically derogatory, to mean stupid, dumb or otherwise inept. And anyone who has ever tried to write and publish a book will know that it does require *some* degree of skill and know-how, even for lowbrow genres.
@@accordingtoalina oh, that's how I meant silly too. I absolutely think it is possible to be inept and be able to get a book published.
Bellesa toys are the bestttt!!
I see that the mob wife trend has recycled. Jackie Collins wrote the Lucky Santangelo novels beginning in 1981.TikTok is another layering of the reading aesthetics. We often forget that books are a form of technology and an aesthetic. Is reading genres such as romance or fantasy a choice for the reader to use as escapism? Is the reader choosing? Is it there to dull the senses of the masses? Books can be used to help shape people's thinking. I think of other forms of media, such as theater, films, and other art forms. The people behind in making decisions of what we see and hear. Social media is another tool by which people create algorithms and make decisions. And those people come with their biases and worldviews. A book I viewed on Amazon will appear on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and UA-cam. Better yet, if I do a Google search. It's not necessarily an ad; it would be another person's feed or a video about the same book or similar books.
Oh, meanwhile me just obsessed with artbook and book about historical art lol
I mean that sounds super interesting
we used to just call these type of people posers or scenesters.
OH I AM SEATED
i was just thinking about you lol
Good things I hope 😬😬😬
@@accordingtoalina obviously 💖
Alina! Ever been on Pinterest? Hot dudes reading are all over the place. Nevertheless, your opinions always have been interesting since the Dante reading.
great vid
thank you!
the gendering of books really bothers me...the whole "cool girl" "hot girl" lingo feels really alienating as a non-binary person. i just don't see the point in labeling books as for a certain gender, it feels so reductive and like, counter productive. i just feel sad and weird seeing this kind of gendered language with literature as someone who doesn't identify with one. i understand if it's a list of books *about* girls, but that doesn't mean it's only *for* girls. it's just so odd to me that binary gendered language has been increasingly used in online communities the last couple of years. also all this "cool girl" bs is super grounded in whiteness as well lol it's all a mess
This is all so foreign to me. But worry not, I shall infiltrate these communities and get them on the Thomas Ligotti bandwagon.
hello you so pretty i love you
🥹🥹🥹
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One of the things i really don't like is that we never really get to see an MC who's not female. I'm female, bi & was always a little tomboyish so i relate to any or all MCs or atleast want to get their point of view. Why is every MC a female who's between the ages of 17-30? Why can't a "hot girl book" be about a 75 year old grandpa ( who's not dying lmao) . The lack of perspectives really irks me.
Come on Alina, don’t be a coward. You called out Joe Rogan and I’m giving some push-back. Answer my questions. Everyone gets a heart but the dangerous scary-question guy. You said it, defend it. Be real.
There’s nothing to defend, there are countless articles and youtube videos breaking down every sensationalist theory he has brought forth and which was subsequently debunked, especially at the height of the pandemic. My choice in not responding to your initial comment has nothing to do with cowardice, it’s rather a case of spending my time and energy on comments that are actually engaging with the topic of the video.
@@accordingtoalina Disingenuous! That’s no escape. You made a claim you can’t back up so you say “they said….”. Lame.
I hope that its fine if I ask, but is the Dante series over?🥲
it is completely fine to ask! I've decided to put the book club on ice for the time being because I was finding it difficult to balance the workload. I have a couple of health issues that got more complicated last year and I'm still figuring out how much work I can do compared to even just two years ago. Since the book club was a complete passion project, it was sadly the one thing I could let go of without it affecting me financially. I've unlisted the videos because I didn't want new people to find them and then be disappointed to see they suddenly stopped, but I shared a link to them all in my newsletter (see the about me section on my channel), so you can rewatch them that way if you wanted to double check something. I also still have all my Inferno and Purgatorio newsletters up and free for everyone, if you want to read them
@@accordingtoalinaThanks for sharing where they can be accessed. Indeed this is a great passion project you have taken up and it shows! Made me finally access a book that has been lying in my shelf for a while. Wishing you a speedy recovery! 🙏🏽
I’m so glad to hear you’re reading in without me and thank you for the kind words! I know a lot of people got really excited for the book club and I was very sad to disappoint everyone. Sending you the best also ❤