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.

Why the shrinking sentence might tell us more than we think

Every so often, someone announces that the novel is in decline. Usually, this is followed by a familiar roll call of suspects: phones, streaming, BookTok, schools, short attention spans, modern life, the algorithm, and the general moral decay of people who do not own enough bookmarks.

This time, though, the anxiety has a number attached.

A recent Economist piece argued that it is not only that people are reading less, but that “the texture of what is being read is changing,” noting that its analysis of hundreds of New York Times bestsellers found that sentences in popular books have become almost a third shorter since the 1930s.

The rise of the hyper-niche book club

From "sad girl autumn" to "cosy fantasy without war," readers are forming ultra-specific clubs that speak to identity, mood and emotional resonance.

Remember when book clubs were just about gathering around the latest must-read novel with a glass of wine in hand? That version still exists (and thrives), but something stranger and more specific has quietly been gaining ground: the hyper-niche book club. 

Emily Henry and the craft of commercial fiction

It’s not just that Emily Henry writes bestsellers. It’s that she writes the kind of commercial fiction people want to reread, smart, emotionally layered romantic comedies that balance character, structure and warmth in just the right proportions. 

As a reader and a fan, I’ve marvelled at how her novels manage to feel both comfortably familiar and quietly profound.

Why the Classics still cast a spell: reading backwards in the age of the algorithm

Browse through the bookish corners of Instagram or TikTok, and you’ll encounter a familiar pattern: glossy covers, rapid emotional claims, and an endless stream of “must-reads” that promise devastation, catharsis, or shocking twists. 

It sometimes feels that the language of the algorithm values sensation over subtlety. Amid this noisy chorus, the quiet, deliberate appeal of the classics becomes harder to hear, yet more essential than ever. It is the reason that we return to them. And while some say it's about nostalgia. It isn't that at all.

Is "Performative Reading" really so awkward?

It’s the quietest rebellion of 2025: the reader with a paperback in a coffee shop, a hardcover in hand on the train, a thick novel laid gently on a park bench. Yet according to a recent piece in The Guardian, even this small, once-innocent gesture, reading in public, is now tinged with suspicion. At least reading certain kinds of books is. So, the question is, are we reading, or are we performing?