With the development of BookTok, Goodreads, and the rising competitive
atmosphere among readers online comes the group of people classifying literature
as worthy or unworthy. There is a growing consensus that if you’re not reading
classics or high-brow literature, you are wasting your time. Some are even going as
far to say that it is “anti-intellectual” to ready trashy rom-coms or romantasy novels.
However, isn’t it important to just be reading anyway, no matter what the genre is?
The Reading Agency reported that half of adults in the UK don’t read regularly
, and that 44 per cent of young people aged 16-24 are now what is referred to as
‘lapsed readers:’ people who used to be regular readers who have now fallen out of
the habit. Many of these responders said that they either found reading difficult or
struggled focusing due to an increase in technology and social media usage. It is no
secret that reading numbers have declined, nor can the impact of social media on
attention spans be underestimated, so putting more restrictions on what can be
deemed worthy of reading will just see this number decrease further
Many people who have got into reading in recent years have started with
books such as It Ends With Us and A Court of Thorns and Roses. Whilst there are
valid criticisms of these books and their authors, the fact remains that people are
still avoiding social media and its short hits of dopamine by reading these books. By
focusing on something for a considerable amount of time, people are instead
engaging in creative world-building, imagination and comprehension skills. In fact,
so-called trashy books can sometimes be more engaging than classics due to their
colloquial language and the relatability of characters to modern readers.
Deeming readers of these kinds of books anti-intellectual creates an unnecessary division in a community where people should be uniting to combat those who are trying to limit access to reading and education. In this day and age, reading is a resistance against a rising wave of political extremism and international
tension. At the end of the day, any sort of reading allows us to increase our average
literacy rates and therefore widen our political horizons, bringing an overall sense of
benefit to wider society.
Photo by Elin Melaas on Unsplash