Unquiet
Things

I was watching a BookTube video a few months ago when someone casually mentioned they didn’t start reading until a few years ago. I weirdly found that comment upsetting, and it sent me spiraling back to sixth grade, wondering if these newly-minted book enthusiasts were the people who made reading feel weird and wrong when I was small. I thought about Mary Josenhans, who wasn’t even in my class but somehow knew enough about my reading habits to tell one of my younger sisters that I was a big nerd – not even bothering to insult me directly, just trying to make a kid feel ashamed of her sibling. Mind your own business, Mary. (Shoutout to Mrs. Haney, though, who gave eleven-year-old me a copy of Pet Sematary and changed my life.) I wasn’t really even properly bullied as this was just one incident, not a pattern; mostly I was just ignored and neglected by other kids – but that one moment taught me that reading marked you as socially unacceptable.

I bet Mary J. has a popular BookTok account where she uses trending audio to arrange her book spines by color and has half a dozen Stanley cups prominently displayed. And that’s where my petty, intrusive thoughts really kick in: what if some of these people building careers off books are the same ones who once made bookworms feel like freaks? Don’t get me wrong – I’m genuinely glad when anyone discovers the joy of books, no matter when it happens. There’s no timeline for falling in love with stories, and I’m not trying to be some literary gatekeeper deciding who gets to call themselves a reader. It’s probably unfair, and maybe it’s just my algorithm, but reading genuinely seems to have become trendy in a way it never was when I was growing up hiding out in bathroom stalls reading Interview With The Vampire. Suddenly everyone’s a book influencer, BookTok is a thing, and reading is… cool? After decades of it being decidedly not cool.

Which brings me to what’s really been bothering me. In true Taurus fashion, I’ve been stewing over something that I read all the way back in 2019 – an essay arguing that “liking books isn’t a personality.” The author positioned bookishness as essentially a consumer identity, a performance of intellectual superiority rather than genuine love of reading. Their argument fits into this broader pattern where there’s apparently a cultural sweet spot for how much you’re supposed to care about things – not too little (then you’re basic or uncommitted) but not too much (then you’re obsessive or weird). Their ideas have been bouncing around my head ever since, especially as I’ve watched similar takes spread through think pieces and comment sections. I’ve been meaning to write something about it, but I didn’t know what. I still don’t know exactly what my point is, but I have a lot of thoughts. (And as I have shared before, “I don’t know” is perfectly ok and a great place to start!)

I was a shy, scared child who didn’t want to talk to anyone and desperately didn’t want them to talk to me. In a world that felt perpetually too loud, too bright, too demanding of interaction I wasn’t equipped to give, books offered something revolutionary: a place to direct my gaze that felt entirely legitimate. Here was conversation where no one had to speak aloud, where I could disappear so completely that teachers would have to call my name twice to pull me back from whatever story had claimed me.

I was that kid spacing out in class because I was thinking about Nancy Drew’s latest mystery or Harriet’s tomato sandwiches – why did they sound so appealing when I’d never even tried one? During recess and lunch, while other children navigated the complex social ecosystems of playground politics, I found corners – behind the library, under slide, in a classroom corner – anywhere I could unfold a paperback and follow Meg Murry through time and space or wander Middle-earth with Bilbo.

Reading became my escape mechanism. Books taught me how to be alone without being lonely, how to find richness in solitude, how to build an entire interior universe that no one could take away or mock or misunderstand. When I read now about people dividing readers into “authentic” versus “performative” categories, I wonder: what do you call the child who read to survive?

As I grew older, books remained my refuge, but the reasons I needed refuge kept shifting. When our mother’s alcoholism escalated during my teenage years, I escaped into Stephen King’s horror and The Exorcist – fictional demons somehow made more sense than the chaos at home. As a broke twenty-something, I fell into a weird Russian literature phase – Dostoevsky and Tolstoy felt appropriate for the existential weight of those years. I discovered Francesca Lia Block’s Weetzie Bat, a splendid book of pink bougainvillea and gritty fairies that showed me Los Angeles could be magical, that weirdness could be beautiful. It made me start looking for that same magic in Daytona Beach – which was a stretch, but still. In my thirties, trapped in an abusive relationship, I discovered gothic classics – The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Castle of Otranto, The Monk – stories of women trapped in crumbling castles that felt uncomfortably familiar.

Now, in my forties, nearing fifty and increasingly aware of mortality, I find myself terrified that I will never read everything I want to read before I die. This isn’t anxiety about missing some arbitrary cultural literacy checklist – it’s the particular grief of knowing there are entire worlds I’ll never get to visit, entire conversations I’ll never get to join.

The stories that save you when you’re seven don’t just disappear when you turn twenty-seven, or thirty-seven, or forty-seven. They become part of your emotional foundation, layers of experience that shape how you interpret everything that comes after. When I was eight and read about Lucy Pevensie finding Narnia in the back of a wardrobe, I internalized the possibility that magic might be hiding in plain sight, behind any (maybe every!) door. When I discovered Rebecca at nineteen, I became obsessed with the unnamed narrator’s invisibility, how small and uncertain she felt in a world of people who seemed so sure of themselves. Years later, after my mother, aunt, and both beloved maternal grandparents died, I reread Beloved and understood something fundamental about how trauma lives in bodies, how the past never stays buried.

Books are not separate from my personality; they’re foundational to it. To suggest otherwise feels like suggesting that your childhood doesn’t count toward who you are, or that formative experiences are somehow less authentic than casual preferences.

What irks me about this conversation is how everyone seems to have forgotten what it was actually like to be a reader before reading became cool. There’s this weird revisionist thing happening where people act like loving books was always socially acceptable, like bookishness is some invented consumer identity instead of something kids actually got teased for.

I don’t disagree that performative bookishness exists – it’s everywhere now. But this framework completely erases people like me, for whom books weren’t about performance or status. They were necessity. When that essay discussed the Marie Kondo backlash, dismissing people’s reactions to throwing away books as mere attachment to consumer objects, I wondered: has the author never met someone for whom those books were actual lifelines?

Yes, book culture gets commodified like everything else. But the existence of BookTok lifestyle branding doesn’t cancel out the reality that books genuinely changed some of our lives in ways that go much deeper than aesthetic choices or social signaling

When I post about a book that moved me (and if you follow me anywhere, you know I do this all the time!) I’m not performing bookishness for social credit. I’m doing what humans have always done with stories that matter: trying to share them, trying to find other people who might be changed by them the way I was. The impulse to say, “You have to read this,” isn’t about demonstrating intellectual superiority – it’s about the very human desire to connect over shared wonder.

What these critics don’t understand is that loving something deeply doesn’t preclude also enjoying the social aspects of that love. The fact that I sometimes read for community doesn’t invalidate the times I read for survival. The fact that I enjoy discussing books doesn’t mean my attachment to them is somehow less authentic than someone who reads in perfect solitude.

For those of us who were shaped by books from an early age, reading isn’t something we do – it’s something we are. It’s in the way we process emotions through narrative frameworks, the way we understand complex situations by thinking about which stories they remind us of, the way we’ve learned to find meaning by paying attention to the kinds of details that writers notice.

When people say “liking books isn’t a personality,” I wonder what they think would be left if you removed all the ways that books have shaped how I think, how I feel, how I understand relationships and power and beauty and loss. What personality would remain after you extracted all the stories that taught me how to be human?

Some of us remember when being caught with a book at the wrong moment meant social death. Some of us remember teachers who rolled their eyes at the kid who finished assignments early and pulled out a novel, remember classmates who treated reading for pleasure like a personal attack on their lifestyle choices.

The fact that reading has become trendy, that bookish aesthetics are now Instagram-worthy, that literary culture has been monetized in ways previous generations couldn’t have imagined, none of this changes the reality that books saved some of our lives in ways that went far beyond entertainment or education or cultural capital.

The people who dismiss deep engagement as performance are often the ones who have never experienced anything deeply enough to understand what they’re critiquing. They mistake intensity for pretension because they’ve never felt intensity themselves. They confuse passion with performance because they’ve never been passionate about anything that couldn’t be contained within socially acceptable boundaries.

But I think some of us know better. Some of us know what it means to be saved by books, to be formed by stories, to carry entire libraries inside ourselves as emotional infrastructure. Some of us understand that reading isn’t just something we do – it’s something we are.

Let’s maybe switch the focus. Instead of me defending what I love, I want to know: what gets you jazzed? What deep passion have you been made to feel freakish for? What thing that formed you have people dismissed as performative or shallow?

Tell me about the thing you love that supposedly “isn’t a personality.”

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