One summer, I waged a war with my best friend over a famous book about friendship. It wasn’t the content of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novel that divided us but how we proved that we loved it. We did so the way we have since our teens: logging page-count progress, leaving pithy reviews, and reading theories from strangers, all on Goodreads. I felt clever and motivated and anxious, but ultimately an arbitrary pressure clouded the actual words on the page — I had to wonder: What was I reading for anymore?
The secondary social engagement is entangled with the actual act of reading, for me and 125 million other people. Since its launch in 2007, the “world’s largest site for readers” has transformed the consumption of books. Right now, book sales in the U.S. are the highest they’ve ever been. A prolonged period of forced isolation is one proposed cause; so is the rise in easy content creation (meaning #BookTok). There’s a desire stirring in our culture, both in reaction to the digitization of life and in line with the trendy factor that digital platforms foster, to be seen as someone who reads overshadowing the reading itself.