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.

The BookTok canon is getting older, and that is not an accident

There is a particular kind of TikTok video that makes me laugh and then immediately makes me suspicious. You know the one. Someone holds up a book that looks like it could do structural work in a small house, says they were “not prepared”, and then cuts to a string of reactions that suggest the novel has personally rearranged their internal organs.

Sometimes it is a brand new release. Increasingly, it is not.

The annotated life: Why marginalia is back in style

Marginalia, you either love it or hate it. Once considered the mark of a disrespectful reader, someone scribbling on the pristine pages of novels, marginalia has returned with an unexpected flourish.

Instagram is full of annotated pages, complete with underlines, post-its, and impassioned scribbles. On TikTok, readers film themselves reacting in real time, pen in hand. Even published authors are weighing in, sharing how marginal notes shaped their early reading lives.

Why men read less than women — And how to change it

It remains a sad truth universally acknowledged that women read more books than men.

Twenty years ago, Ian McEwan remarked that ‘when women stop reading, the novel will be dead’. I found myself thinking about that last week, sitting by the pool on holiday. 

The women — myself included — were all reading novels. The men, almost without exception, were staring at their phones. Doom scrolling. A small snapshot, perhaps, but one that reflects — and still reflects — a broader reality.