The literary echo chamber: Are we reading in circles?

I love a good book recommendation. Who doesn’t? But lately, I’ve started to wonder: are we all reading the same five novels, over and over again?

Log on to BookTok and you’ll find Rebecca Yarros’s Fourth Wing, Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses, and Taylor Jenkins Reid’s The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo passed around like holy scripture. 

Over on Bookstagram, Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow or Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library are often perched artfully next to a flat white and some autumnal leaves. If you’re deep into literary fiction, chances are someone has handed you Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You, Elif Batuman’s The Idiot, or the ever-expanding crop of novels compared to Donna Tartt’s The Secret History.

The duplicate titles surface. The same “If you liked X, you’ll love Y” logic drives everything from algorithmic recommendations to publisher blurbs. It’s comforting, sure, but it also raises a quiet question: Is the literary world becoming its own echo chamber?

There was a time when recommendations came with a personal flourish. A bookseller’s scribbled staff pick. A friend pressing a battered paperback into your hand with the promise, “Just trust me.” Now, recommendations come quickly and en masse, backed by data, social virality, or the subtle nudge of commercial strategy. We are, increasingly, being read to — even as we believe we’re choosing.

That’s not to say we’ve stopped finding great books. But are we seeing new ones? Or merely re-spinning the same safe canon in prettier, Instagrammable jackets?

Even the rise of dark academia — novels like Bunny or The Secret History, and more recently The Cloisters, by Katy Haye, or The Atlas Six, by Olivia Blake — feels like a curated aesthetic loop. The resurgence of campus novels. The endless hunt for the next Sally Rooney. It’s all a bit like literary déjà vu. A mood board of taste, curated by culture. And taste, as we know, can be strangely circular.

So, how do we break free?

I’ve started saying yes to books I’ve never heard of. I picked up Weasels in the Attic by Hiroko Oyamada, published by a small but brilliant press (Tilted Axis). 

I also stumbled upon an out-of-print Ursula K. Le Guin essay collection that isn’t featured on any listicle. I am a huge fan of hers and went through a stage of reading everything she wrote in college. 

I read a strange, aching novel called Mild Vertigo by Mieko Kanai — disorienting and quiet in a way that none of my feeds had prepared me for.

Outside the loop, the literary world is weird, wide, and full of surprises. There’s more to discover than what’s trending.

And sometimes, the best reads are the ones no algorithm thinks you’ll like.