The Reading Revolution: How The Literary Sphere Took Over
Paul Mescal sits in a pub. He’s alone, his phone is charging on the table in front of him, and he’s drinking what could be a gin and tonic but could also be a sparkling water. What matters, though, is that he’s reading. And not just any book: he’s reading the 1965 ‘underrated classic’ Stoner by John Williams. It’s the kind of paperback you want your date to slide into the pocket of their jeans when you arrive at the bar five minutes late. If you were to, say, have a fantasy about Paul Mescal reading topless in bed, you’d probably imagine this book.
Not that I’m suggesting for a moment that Mescal was performatively reading, but there is a certain cultural cachet in being photographed with a book right now. There’s Marc Jacobs taking a selfie while reading not one, but two James Baldwin books in a week (If Beale Street Could Talk and The Fire Next Time); and Kendall Jenner saving her place in Joan Didion’s grief memoir The Year of Magical Thinking as she adjusts her bikini bottoms; Kaia Gerber out walking with a number of books clutched in her hand like accessories, and never placed inside the bag on her shoulder.
Emily Ratajkowski wearing merchandise from literary magazine The Paris Review; Dua Lipa holding the novel Trust by Hernan Diaz up to her perfectly painted pout; and Lupita Nyong’o cradling 10 books that helped her heal from heartbreak (a list that told a story all on its own). Natalie Portman has even created her own style of reading selfie, almost as if she is playing peek-a-boo with a baby; she peers a mischievous single eye over the top of her current book of choice.
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And that’s just the celebs. You may have also noticed the colour-coded book arrangements on socials, each of the pages adorned with matching Post-it notes, the girl on the bus sitting next to you ugly-crying over A Little Life, another laughing because Sloane Crosley managed to write a funny (and heart-breaking) suicide memoir. The best TV adaptations right now are straight from the bestseller lists (Three Body Problem, One Day, Queenie), and everyone wants you to join their book club (including Gerber).
We’re undeniably in the age of books, and physical ones at that. In the UK alone, 669 million printed books were sold in 2022, the highest level on record. And this isn’t being driven by older readers – it’s Gen Z (those aged 27 and younger) who are choosing and buying physical books, accounting for 80% of purchases that year. ‘They’re not just buying the books and reading them at home alone either, they’re holding them aloft as status objects, they are screaming about them, they are forming whole social groups and behaviours around books themselves,’ says Gabby Humphreys, who runs the popular Instagram account @humphreads, where she charts her reading habits, averaging 15 books a month (‘mostly contemporary, all sad’).
The irony is that e-readers made the publishing industry up its cover game, as the physical book had to become more precious to compete. Arguably, these new, photogenic books fuelled the growth of #BookTok and #Bookstagram, where fresh releases are given the reverence of a new Tabi boot. No longer a private refuge, books are the chosen totem of today: a fashion accessory, an item of homeware (to rival a marbled candle), a political placard, a conversational conch, a public comfort blanket and the latest influencing tool – all yours for £8.99.
I’ve felt it too, this draw to physical books and the communities that form around them. So, in what can only be described as a move of both madness and bravery, six months ago, on a cobbled street in Lisbon, I opened up an English-language bookstore and named it Salted Books – because everything is better salted, and the best books are the salty sort.
If, a few years ago, you had told me that one day I would leave my corporate advertising job and have my own independent bookshop – having never owned a shop, nor worked in a bookshop before – I’d have thought you were dissing my career trajectory or predicting my financial ruin. But, like other independent bookstores (the number of which climbed to a 10-year high in the UK and Ireland in 2022), we’re actually selling books, thousands a month, and everyone keeps telling me I’m living their dream – which, if I could magic away the admin, is my dream, too. I mean, what’s not to love about advising a customer on which book will definitely make her cry, a surprisingly popular request (the book is Notes To Self by Emilie Pine – you have been warned)?
‘When Sally Rooney’s new book Intermezzo was announced, my phone blew up like someone had died,’ Humphreys tells me. Beni, one of our Gen-Z booksellers (fancy title for ‘works in a bookshop’), admitted she cried actual tears on hearing the news. For days after, whenever Rooney’s name was mentioned in the shop I watched as people clutched their chests in anticipation. We all love fangirling, and when that proof circulates you know it will be flouted on socials like a backstage pass at a Taylor gig. ‘Can you imagine what we’ll do when Donna Tartt announces a new book?’ asks Humphreys, swooning. (An aside: Tartt has published three books throughout her career, each with roughly 11 years between them, and it is now 11 years since her exquisite bestseller The Goldfinch, so Humphreys’ swoon is not without cause.)
While some of the current ‘It’ authors, like Coco Mellors (author of Cleopatra and Frankenstein) or Yomi Adegoke (The List), are influencers in their own right, with strong Instagram presence and cultish followings of readers, plenty of the buzziest literary talents are women who avoid social media, such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Zadie Smith, Ottessa Moshfegh and Emma Cline. We don’t even know Elena Ferrante’s real name, so covert is she. And many of the books currently trending are reprints from dead authors including Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, bell hooks, Susan Sontag and Joan Didion (there’s your softboi reading list right there).
Unlike other industries, where it can feel like a woman’s value lessens as she ages, the authors being celebrated (and whose books are carried in see-through tote bags by the likes of Lily-Rose Depp) are often women in their sixties and beyond – Jane Smiley, Bernadine Evaristo, Deborah Levy and Rebecca Solnit. Not only are these names venerated by young female readers (44% of girls cited reading as a hobby at the age of 15 compared with 24% of boys, according to Deloitte), but women are crucial to fiction’s very survival (we buy 80% of all novels, according to Nielsen). Meanwhile, models, actors and other celebrities who don’t always get the chance to share the inner workings of their brains are turning to books as a way to engage with the public on an intellectual level. Yes, they’re starting book clubs.
Whereas, once upon a time, a famous person might have taken on a charity to demonstrate they have depth, the celebrity book club is the next big thing. No longer led by the monolith Oprah Winfrey in the US or Richard and Judy in the UK, we now have a suite of them vying for our attention: Kaia Gerber’s Library Science, Emma Robert’s Belletrist, Florence Welch’s Between Two Books, Dakota Johnson’s TeaTime, Dua Lipa’s Service95, and the simply named Reese’s Book Club and Natalie’s Book Club, by Reese Witherspoon and Natalie Portman, respectively. Emma Watson’s was discontinued and, like many book clubs in the real world, Kim Kardashian and Chrissy Teigen’s never met again after their first discussion. Sarah Jessica Parker has gone a step further and has her own publishing imprint, SJP Lit.
In a way, these women are lending their fame, youth and beauty to books. ‘How many more people tuned into the Booker Prize because Dua Lipa gave a speech?’ asks Amy Mae Baxter, editor and founder of literary magazine Bad Form, which platforms writers of colour. Luxury fashion has also embraced the world of books. Last year, we saw Chanel work with Cliveden Literary Festival, the launch of Dior’s Book Tote Club, which spotlighted independent book shops, and, this year, the introduction of Miu Miu’s Literary Club in Milan. Meanwhile, Valentino sponsored the 2024 Booker Prize ceremony.
Ignoring that the term ‘book club’ has become a catch-all for aligning your brand or person with almost anything literary, the books these clubs are picking are often great reads; Reese Witherspoon’s club has been particularly consistent if you like a spicy beach read. One of Kaia Gerber’s recent selects was iconic LA author Eve Babitz’s 1979 novel Sex and Rage. Natalie Portman aptly promoted Heartburn by Nora Ephron in the midst of her divorce, though in April of this year she chose the 1865 text Walden by Henry David Thoreau. ‘Not even in my top 1,000 guesses,’ wrote one book influencer on Instagram. ‘Like, OK Professor Portman,’ commentated New York Magazine critic Emily Gould.
‘It makes me wonder if anyone is advising her,’ says Chelsea Hodson, whose literary essay collection reached sad-girl-lit cult status after being photographed in the hands of Kendall Jenner on a sun lounger. ‘A book like [Walden] is a social-media dead end. It falls into the category of “books people feel they ought to read, rather than want to.”’ We’ll add Walden to the list of most-bought-but-unread books (a title currently held by Stephen Hawking’s
A Brief History of Time).
So, if we’re not reading Thoreau, what are we reading? ‘Look out for the woman-in-doomed-romance trope,’ says author Ore Agbaje-Williams, whose book The Three of Us will no doubt be one of the most popular reads of the summer (prepare for the girl next to you at the pool to be reading it, too). ‘There is something counter-cultural about the fact that everyone is reading more,’ says novelist Michael Donkor. ‘We live in such noisy societies now, and we’re rediscovering the power of quietness – which you can also see in some of the titles that are remaining steadfast in bookshops right now: Wintering, Braiding Sweetgrass, The Body Keeps the Score.’
I have a customer base that I affectionately (and secretly) call ‘the nerd bosses’. These customers are girls or non-binary Gen-Zers who are always dressed on point, buy books to match their nails, make origami bookmarks, are writing their PhDs on lesbian representation in 1980s Brazilian films, and never dip on their politics or expectations for cover art. They seek out independent presses such as Fitzcarraldo Editions, Dead Ink, Cipher Press and Peninsula. They have Stormzy’s latest #Merky Books offering on pre-order. Research by Book Riot showed that 79% of Gen Z regard representation as hugely important when deciding what books and media to consume.
Despite the notorious whiteness of the publishing industry – and the historic lack of diversity when it comes to authors and their subject matter – this is slowly changing, as TikTok ‘bookfluencer’ John-Paul (@jpreads6) explains: ‘There was a time when, being Black, I didn’t see myself represented in literature. There was a lot of trauma porn, but I wanted sloppy romances and literary fiction with Black characters.’ (He eventually found it – Seven Days in June by Tia Williams.)
‘Even if the book is about utter destruction, reading still maintains my mental health,’ says Humphreys of @humphreads. As well as running her book account, she is a lecturer in mental health at a UK university, with a PhD in psychology. Has this fed into her love of reading? ‘Absolutely: reading is categorically self-care.’
‘There is a level of subversion that is happening in publishing,’ says Romilly Morgan, who runs the imprint Brazen and has published hits such as Women Don’t Owe You Pretty by Florence Given and Strong Female Character by Fern Brady. ‘Readers don’t want the same platitudes; they want books that are addressing taboos,’ she says. It’s true: in my bookshop, it’s the dark, challenging books, those that reflect our truest selves, that I’m most often asked for – whether it’s a customer looking for a book to give to a friend who is having an abortion (After Sex, published by Silver Press) or someone searching for queer, horny sci-fi (the story collection Unreal Sex). As Morgan laments: ‘People are a lot wilder than the books we’ve chosen to publish in the past.’
This is our reading era – and look, admittedly, I might be someone who strokes books, but in a world of relentless, catastrophic trauma, what a gift a book is. How wonderful to be lusting after something I can afford, something that connects me to others as well as gifting me time alone. Reading is an earned pleasure – there are always moments when I have to fight the urge to pick up my phone instead – but, every day, I feel lucky to get so much from something that causes no adverse effects; I get as much out of reading about a crazy party as I do from throwing one – just minus the hangover.
This article appears in the July/August 2024 issue of ELLE UK, out now.
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