Stop Trying to Make Books Feel Like the Internet

In reviewing a cohort of recent novels about the contemporary male experience, Robert Rubsam hits on the idea that writers know they have to compete with the internet and video games for men’s attention, and he points out that many writers attempt to do this by imitating those other, more dopamine-inducing forms of media.

Desperate to cajole readers away from their phones, these writers deploy online language and screen-friendly forms. In the process, they have all written books that demonstrate what the novel might increasingly become in a world of ever-more-fragmented attention spans, where literacy rates are falling and screen time is skyrocketing and few people, not even self-consciously “literary” writers, are immune: a form continuous with the internet and increasingly inextricable from the demands of the digital world.

Rubsam articulates and echoes a conversation Jeff and I have been having for the last year or so on the Book Riot Podcast: increasingly, it feels like literary writers do not trust their readers to work with ambiguity or get the big ideas of a book without having them overtly stated in the text. Some authors have told me they’ve received direction from editors and publishers encouraging to connect all of the dots for readers, to make their books easy to understand and digest.

I understand the source of the concerns, I really do, but trying to make books feel more like the social media and video games they compete with is the wrong strategy. Books can do some things that social media and video games cannot. They can provide a truly immersive, enriching experience that actually feels good to our brains. Rubsam notes that, in their anxious scramble to get and maintain readers’ attention, many writers “prioritize textual legibility and narrative immediacy,” two ingredients that make for a pretty shallow reading experience.

Books will have to continue competing with the internet in order to survive. In a moment when only 16% of Americans read for pleasure and nearly half of young people wish social media hadn’t been invented, the ceiling is high. We should be doing all we can to distinguish the experience of reading from the experience of being online. Let books be books. Let them be weird and hard and confusing. Let them demand our attention rather than spoon-feed us the answers. Let them remind us how satisfying it can be to work with what Megan Mayhew-Bergman refers to as “the analog mind.” Let them be a true alternative rather than a poor imitation.

Literary Pet Names Get a BookTok Boost

In one of the more creatively targeted press releases I’ve received in my 17 years in publishing, I’ve learned that a whole lot of Americans are naming their pets after BookTok faves. According to TrustedHousesitters’ survey of nearly 100,000 pet names, there’s been a 318% increase in pets named Violet (shout out to Rebecca Yarros) and a 320% jump in Onyx. Feyre, Azriel, and Rowen from the ACOTAR-verse are also climbing the charts. But it’s Twilight‘s Bella Swan leading the way as the #1 book-inspired pet name and #2 overall pick, followed by Jasper (also from Twilight, with maybe the occasional nod to author Jasper Hale), Winnie, Harry, and Tigger. Calvin and Hobbes both make the list, as do Atticus, Gatsby, Gandalf, and Frodo. Have you ever given a pet a book-inspired name?