By Jasmine Rusady
As a teenager, I was the weird kid who always had her nose in a book. Only later, in the safety of young adulthood, did I find out there were many of us who were secret readers—secret because, at the time, reading was not something the cool kids did.
There are no such problems now. With the rise of online book communities like BookTok and Bookstagram, being a reader has become trendy and ‘cool’. This brings me joy like nothing ever could. On the flip side, this reading trend has exacerbated the trope-y side of the book industry and set unrealistic expectations of what it means to be a ‘reader’.
People become ‘readers’ the same way you might see a person wearing jeans, a graphic tee and a pork-pie hat and call them a hipster. From toppling to-be-read piles and immaculate colour-coded bookshelves, how has being a ‘reader’ changed the act of reading?
The tropification of books
In simple terms, tropes are narrative conventions used by authors to build characters and plots and used by readers to recognise and navigate through stories. While the use of tropes is nothing new, the rise of BookTok and the romance genre has amplified it immensely. Nowadays, it is rare to see a popular book being promoted and discussed without mentioning its tropes.
The benefits of the book trope resurgence are clear to me. Tropes help authors to gauge what readers want and help readers to find their ideal book. Book tropes are signifiers that allow the three parties—author, text, and reader—to make their way to each other. These way-finders become even more important in an ever-increasing and crowded book market.
The issue is that books are now being written and marketed as if they are made for BookTok, manufactured to fit the app’s specific audience and trends. Popular tropes such as ‘slow burn’ or ‘enemies to lovers’ dominate the industry, as well as very specific ones (called microtropes) like: ‘who did this to you?’, ‘touch her and you die’, ‘knife to throat’, ‘only one bed’ etc. This may seem harmless at first, but when we read, recommend and write books this way, we no longer read stories. We are reading a compilation of tropes, stacking them on each other like you would build a burger or choose the toppings on your froyo cup.
On a storytelling level, marketing and buying books in an increasingly tropified industry zaps any tension out of the story. When you pick a new book up, you already know, for example, that the two main characters who don’t see eye-to-eye will eventually fall in love because it’s been marketed as an ‘enemies to lovers’ story. You also know that one main character will have a villain arc because there is a trope template on the author’s Instagram page that says so. Although this might help those who wish to find a specific trope or story, it becomes a slippery slope when tropified books start to lose diversity, individuality and the readers’ anticipation.
There is a clear difference between books that are built around tropes and stories that just so happen to have tropes in them. The former is the practice of ingesting books à la carte instead of as a whole meal.
Taking away all of my terrible food metaphors, my point is that tropes have always existed as part of storytelling, but now, all other aspects of the story (plot, character development, worldbuilding, etc.) have become secondary to these tropes. It has come to the point that everything in between your ‘knife to throat’ and ‘who did this to you’ scenes is only filler, completely insignificant and indistinct enough that it could be copy-pasted from other similar books.
Just food for thought from a reader.
Continuously using the same popular tropes will result in every book feeling the same. A recent controversy that highlights this issue is Lauren Roberts’ Powerless, which has been criticised for being too similar to Red Queen and The Hunger Games. As an active member of the online book community, I’ve seen a long chain of these same-text-different-font books published in an increasingly tropified industry. Novelty and diversity in stories are dying because you can only switch-swap so many times before you start feeling, ‘Wait, haven’t I read this before?’
The ‘reader’ aesthetic
No matter how genuine social media content can be, at least a facet of it is always performative. I have no doubt that these new trendy ‘readers’ are genuine and passionate about what they are reading. But there is a particular ‘reader’ aesthetic, an unspoken rule of how a ‘reader’ should sound or look in these online spaces. These arise from the implicit gatekeeping of the community, making you feel like you need to do certain activities or adhere to certain conventions to fit in.
With social media, it is easy to compare yourself to other ‘readers’ and feel bad when you do not fit the mould. During my time in online book spaces, I’ve observed a few conventions that could be summarised (with exaggeration and humour) like this: you are not a ‘reader’ if you don’t have an impeccable, colour-coded bookshelf, you aren’t part of the book community if your pages aren’t filled with sticky notes and you are not serious about books if you don’t have hundreds of them on your TBR list!
There is such pressure to be the ideal reader that it’s actually hard work. Reading becomes a fast-paced, mass-consumable thing, with less importance placed on savouring the books being read. Videos and posts about being a ‘voracious reader’ or ‘certified bookworm’ influence how people choose to read: quantity instead of quality. This sentiment is intensified by reading challenges where ‘readers’ choose short or easy-to-read books to catch up to their reading goals. When we start consuming books like fast fashion, being a ‘reader’ becomes part of the dreaded capitalist machine where more is exciting, more is content, and more is better.
But I will give BookTok credit where it’s due. It has reignited young people’s passion for reading again. It’s making authors and publishers money, which they can use to acquire and publish more diverse stories. Once we manage to navigate through the mainstream algorithm, there are cozy corners of BookTok or Bookstagram that promote slow and relaxed reading without making everything a competition.
Most importantly, there’s something so special about feeling like you’re part of a group, a community of people who share your hobby. Although I have my reservations, behind it all is my anxiety that—like all trends—reading might go out of style. The nerdy child in me is always wary and fearful of the day when being a ‘reader’ stops being the ‘it’ thing.
Jasmine Rusady is a publishing student who (not shockingly) can’t shut up about books and her other media hyper-fixations. In her free time, she loves watching horror movies, cataloguing everything there is to know about punk genres and is always on the hunt for heart-wrenching and jaw-dropping stories, which she has an entire file for under the title ‘Masterpieces’.
Cover image by Kritika Hasija on Unsplash. Free to use under the Unsplash License.
Leave a Reply