Is the literary internet making us better readers?

“There is then creative reading as well as creative writing,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, which is a useful thing to remember in an age when reading can so easily become a performance metric. To read well is not simply to consume a book. It is to meet it, resist it, misunderstand it for a while, and perhaps find that it has been quietly rearranging the furniture in your mind.

There was once a pleasing simplicity to being a reader. You read a book. You liked it, hated it, abandoned it on page 47, pressed it upon a friend, or left it to gather dust with the quiet moral authority of something you still intended to finish.

Now, reading has become visible. Searchable. Trackable. A thing with metrics, shelves, stars, hashtags, hot takes and monthly wrap-ups. A book is no longer only something you encounter in private. It is something you can announce, photograph, annotate, rank, defend, aestheticise and occasionally weaponise.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. Readers have always wanted to find each other. The history of literature is full of clubs, salons, letters, marginalia, lending libraries and people being insufferable about what they have just read. E. M. Forster’s famous instruction in Howards End, “Only connect!”, feels oddly suited to the literary internet. Books have always been a form of connection. The difference now is scale. The literary internet has taken that impulse and plugged it into a machine that never sleeps.

BookTok can turn a forgotten novel into a bestseller. Instagram can make a paperback look like a small domestic altar. Goodreads can make us feel suddenly accountable to a version of ourselves who apparently promised to read 52 books this year. Substack has revived the feeling of receiving a considered literary letter. Threads and X have made it possible to discuss a novel at length, although also possible to reduce it to a fight about whether liking it makes you morally suspect.

The result is a strange mixture of generosity and theatre

At its best, the literary internet has made reading feel less lonely. It has helped readers find books beyond the front tables, beyond the supermarket chart, beyond the recommendations of the same three newspapers. It has given romance, fantasy, horror, translated fiction and small press books a new kind of word-of-mouth energy. It has allowed people to say, with an earnestness that can feel almost radical, “This book understood something about me.”

That matters. Reading is private, but not solitary in the absolute sense. The best books leave us wanting to speak. Not always intelligently. Sometimes all we can manage is, “You have to read this,” which is less a recommendation than an emotional emergency.

Jane Austen gives Caroline Bingley the line, “I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading!” in Pride and Prejudice, and the joke is that Caroline is not quite as committed to reading as she sounds. That feels uncomfortably modern. We too know the pleasure of seeming bookish. The stack, the tote bag, the caption, the highlighted passage. The danger is not that these things are false. The danger is that they can become easier than the harder, quieter act of attention.

The internet has multiplied our literary emergencies. But it has also introduced a new anxiety. Are we reading, or are we curating the appearance of reading? Are we choosing books because they call to us, or because they sit neatly inside the identity we are building online? There is a particular kind of self-consciousness that arrives when reading becomes visible. The coffee shop paperback, the annotated classic, the carefully lit bedside stack: all of it can be sincere, but sincerity becomes harder to recognise once it has been filtered.

This is where things get awkward. Readers do not like being told that their love of books is performative, partly because the accusation often comes with a whiff of snobbery. Why should enthusiasm be suspect just because it is public? Why should a teenager crying over a fantasy series on TikTok be considered less serious than someone silently reading Proust in a chair designed to hurt the spine?

The problem is not performance itself. All reading has a social element. We have always signalled something through our books: intelligence, taste, rebellion, sensitivity, belonging. The problem is when the signal becomes louder than the experience. When a book is flattened into a prop, a vibe, a test of virtue, or a quick piece of content, something gets lost.

It is the slow thing that gets lost

Books do not always reveal themselves instantly. Some irritate us before they instruct us. Some require boredom, patience, rereading, even resistance. A novel can be doing its best work when it is not immediately giving us a quotable line, a clever caption or a clean emotional payoff. The literary internet, for all its pleasures, is not always built for that kind of encounter. It rewards clarity, speed, certainty and feeling. Literature often works in the opposite direction.

Still, it would be too easy to blame the platforms. The more interesting question is what kind of readers we become inside them.

A better reader is not necessarily someone who reads more books, although the internet can certainly make us feel that way. The annual reading challenge has done for literature what the step counter did for walking: turned a humane activity into a small dashboard of guilt. Quantity has its pleasures, but the number of books read tells us very little about the quality of attention given to them.

A better reader might be someone more curious, more porous, more willing to be interrupted by a difficult sentence or an unfamiliar life. Someone who can enjoy the communal buzz around a book without outsourcing their response to it. Someone who can read the fashionable thing and still ask, privately, “Did this move me, or did I only want to be seen having been moved?”

That may be the real gift of the literary internet: not that it makes us better readers automatically, but that it gives us more chances to practise being honest ones.

Because for all the noise, there are moments of genuine connection. A stranger recommends a novel you would never have found. A comment thread opens a line of thought that makes the ending click. A newsletter reminds you of a writer you had neglected. A video made in someone’s bedroom sends thousands of people towards a book that had been waiting, quietly, for its readers.

That is not nothing. In fact, it is rather beautiful

The danger is that we start mistaking visibility for value. The opportunity is that we use visibility to widen the conversation. The best version of the literary internet is not a shop window of clever readers displaying themselves. It is a noisy, imperfect, sometimes embarrassing, often generous commons where books continue doing what they have always done: moving from hand to hand, mind to mind, life to life.

So, is the literary internet making us better readers?

Not by itself. But it might be making it harder for us to pretend that reading is only private. Books have always asked us to connect. The question is whether we can do that without turning every connection into content.

What to read next

• Howards End by E. M. Forster is a great read because it asks, with elegance and emotional intelligence, what it really means to connect across class, temperament and moral imagination. Its famous phrase “Only connect!” still feels like the secret wish beneath every bookish conversation online.

• If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino is a great read because it turns the act of reading into the story itself. Playful, clever and wonderfully strange, it reminds us that readers are never passive. We bring desire, frustration, curiosity and expectation to every page.

• The Possessed by Elif Batuman is a great read because it captures the absurdity and seriousness of literary obsession. Batuman writes about books, scholars and intellectual communities with the perfect mixture of affection and comic suspicion.

• Yellowface by R. F. Kuang is a great read because it understands the modern literary marketplace as a place of ambition, envy, identity and spectacle. It is particularly sharp on visibility, online outrage and the strange hunger to be seen as a writer of importance.

• Dear Reader by Cathy Rentzenbrink is a great read because it makes the case for reading as consolation, companionship and self-knowledge without becoming sentimental. It is warm, generous and ideal for anyone who has ever built a life around books.