Books are like Food

Books are food for the brain; by reading we are consuming knowledge. We are enriching ourselves with imagination and the cultural expression of the author.

So, is it a good thing that Booktok has such a powerful influence over the industry? I mean, given that literacy rates in the US are going down, it’s better than having people not read anything. Surely something is better than nothing.

But you can’t exactly say that anything is better than nothing, if the things you are consuming are of substandard quality?

A diet of junk food will kill you; it doesn’t sustain you nor does it enrich you. You need to eat a diet of high proteins, low carbs and lots of water. You can’t just eat McDonalds every day, for every meal.

So, in the context of books, if you only consume Sarah J Mass, Dark Romance, smut books and LitRPGs, you aren’t really getting sustenance. You are consuming what is for the most part, junk food. These books typically don’t provide much more than wish fulfilment and base thrills.

Which is fine in small doses, but when you don’t have an interest in anything more challenging or intellectually rigorous then Break Me by K.A. Tucker. You are doing the equivalent of eating McDonalds.

I don’t expect people to jump into James Joyce or House of Leaves directly after reading A Court of Thorns and Roses. Nor do I expect people to give up their limited free time to read books that they don’t enjoy. Life is hard and you don’t want to struggle through Dante’s Inferno when you would rather read Ice Breaker.

What I would like to encourage in both my readers and the Booktok influencers who film themselves crying over A Little Life, is to branch out. Explore beyond the comfort zones of the familiar.

If all that you are doing is exploring your fantasies nonstop, perhaps it would be helpful to be a little bit more curious, perhaps don’t be so reliant on tropes as marketing.

Tropes as marketing material, indeed the strict adherence to them, especially in the romance genre is something I find to be concerning. Indeed, after reading Dark Romance like Hooked by Emily McIntire and Break Me, I have noticed that the unwillingness to subvert or reject tropes expected by the reader causes stifled creativity and substandard products.

Like how many adult rewrites of classic fairy tales do we need? How many reimaginings of x do we need? Where is the creativity of putting your own worlds, your own characters upon their strengths alone?

I understand that authors cannot be completely blamed for this. They are following demand; how can we expect them to break from demand if they wish to make money? Romance readers (which makes up the vast majority of Booktok influencers) expect certain things from their books. This is a feedback loop problem.

As a result, authors who produce what the market expects will get rewarded, it doesn’t matter if they are producing junk food editions of classics. Nor does it matter that the material is shallow and predictable to a tee. The reader wants it to be predictable, they want the cheap thrills, the fantasy of fixing the bad boy and indulging in sexual fantasies without the social condemnation.

But surely you would want something more than that? Is that all you want your entertainment to be? Shallow nothings and wish fulfilment?

That might be the case for most people, are we so busy, so tired at the end of the day. That all you want to do is turn off your brain and read some dumb escapist fantasy you find in a LitRPG?

Maybe that is the case, and this isn’t a new phenomenon. People have been consuming disposable fiction since the advent of mass literacy. The problem now could just be the amplified voices of a few in social media.

Maybe….

I don’t know.

But the profitability of these books suggests a success, a profitability that isn’t expressed on Booktok.

I am just worried that we aren’t rewarding intelligence and curiosity. That we are marching towards a media scene that rewards mindless consumption and media bubbles.

I don’t know where this blog post is supposed to go. I am just concerned about the lack of creativity in mainstream media. The unwillingness by the consumer to explore and branch out in their book tastes. That is to say nothing about the weird popularisation of smut in the mainstream, and how it mirrors a more successful attempt of the Golden Age of Porn in the 70s and 80s.

But it ultimately fails to enrich, provide anything aside from a cheap meaningless thrill.

Nobody can sustain themselves on junk food forever, either you will have to cut the habit, or reduce the amount of the junk food in favour of something a bit more substantive. Don’t let the brain rot consume you, hell don’t engage in brain rot, work on brain cultivation. Become better, rather than resign yourselves to mediocrity.

Strive to become better readers, eat better.