The idea of being “well-read” is aspirational to some students, terrifying or daunting to others, and utterly unattainable for all – there will always be more books to read and subjects to study. To be well-read by definition is to be “well-informed in a subject through reading” and “having read widely and attentively,” but who decides what being “well-read” actually looks like? Does it matter at all? The term, tracing back to the 16th century as “being learnéd,” became a status symbol for the wealthy who could afford private teachers. For several centuries, the right to education or the ability to fund one was reserved primarily for the white upper-class man and largely exclusionary to those outside of this circle, such as women or minority ethnic groups.
At its core, being “well-read” is an ambiguous term that attributes having access to books and personal education with being intelligent, smarter, or more knowledgeable than other people who have not read as widely. Quite frankly, the term ignores the various social, political, and economic factors that serve as barriers to becoming “well-read” even today.
Socioeconomic backgrounds can impact the physical and monetary accessibility of written material, and thus may limit someone’s access to being “well-read.” The presence of large libraries, whether inner city or rural, does not ensure people always have the time or ability to access them.
That being said, in a globalized age, online library databases have removed the need for physically being in a library to access materials. But, this shift towards digitalisation, while positive at first glance, comes with challenges of its own – not everyone has access to the internet and often online libraries can be hidden behind paywalls. There are still numerous barriers to having the opportunity to read more widely.
What does “well-read” even look like? The books that loosely and arbitrarily define being “well-read” vary from subject to subject, but generally fall back on canon material or “the classics” that are so often revered by academics. For example, a literature student could associate being “well-read” with names like Jane Austen, Leo Tolstoy, and William Wordsworth, but the same would not apply to philosophy or physics. Not to mention, these canons were created by and for Western academics – Eurocentric histories have been prioritised, impacting a larger global, cultural, and social awareness of non-European or non-white history, intellectualism, and authorship.
At the end of the day, “well-read” doesn’t describe a specific skill or knowledge set. It is ambiguously used to display a person’s intelligence linking back to classist and imperial ideas of supremacy.
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