Karly

I don’t think all modern books are bad, before anybody panics, but I do think there are moments in which I walk into a bookstore, look at an entire table full of neon covers with the same typography, the same tropes, the same “morally grey” men, the same TikTok stickers announcing that this particular novel will apparently “destroy me emotionally”, and feel something inside me physically recoil, not because I hate contemporary literature, because I don’t, and not because I think popular books are inherently shallow, because some of my favourite novels in the world were enormously successful, but because somewhere along the way reading started to feel frighteningly optimised, as though books are no longer simply books but products engineered to survive the internet.

And perhaps this sounds unbearably pretentious, but sometimes I miss when reading felt slightly accidental, when discovering books involved wandering around a bookstore for three hours with absolutely no plan whatsoever, picking something up because the cover looked strange or because a sentence on the back unsettled me in an interesting way or because somebody I admired vaguely referenced it in an interview fifteen years ago. And I miss the feeling of stumbling into literature rather than being funnelled towards it by an algorithm that has already decided who I am and what sort of emotional experience I’m likely to consume next.

Because that is what so much contemporary reading culture feels like now, consumption, and fast consumption specifically, where books are marketed through tropes before prose, aesthetics before atmosphere, relatability before style, and entire novels are introduced through lists that read almost like metadata: enemies to lovers, one bed, morally grey male lead, found family, slow burn, as though literature were no different from selecting a Netflix category on a Friday night when you’re too tired to think.

And listen, I understand why this happened because the internet rewards immediacy and algorithms reward familiarity and people like feeling oriented before they commit to something, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with wanting recommendations or finding joy in communities like BookTok, because if anything, seeing young people excited about reading again is lovely in an era where everybody insists attention spans are dead, but I do wonder whether platforms designed around optimisation subtly encourage us to become less curious readers over time, not less intelligent readers necessarily, but less adventurous ones.

Because when every recommendation is generated based on what you already know you enjoy, eventually your reading life begins to narrow instead of expand, and the algorithm does not particularly care about surprise, difficulty, ambiguity, or challenge because it wants engagement, it wants predictability, it wants you to keep consuming, which is perhaps why so much contemporary fiction now feels oddly homogenised, as though it has been sanded down into maximum readability.

Sometimes I’ll pick up a modern novel and immediately feel as though I can hear the internet humming underneath it, where the dialogue feels engineered for screenshots, the pacing feels designed around adaptation deals before the book has even had the chance to exist as a book, characters explain themselves constantly, terrified of ambiguity and perhaps terrified of being misunderstood online, and everything becomes hyper-accessible, hyper-self-aware, hyper-legible, while nothing is allowed to simply linger strangely.

I also think part of the issue is that contemporary media has become terrified of allowing audiences to infer anything for themselves. Everything is overexplained now. Characters don’t simply behave emotionally, they narrate their emotions with the precision of a therapy infographic. Subtext gets flattened into exposition. Symbolism is explained before it has the chance to breathe. Every motivation is clarified, every ending dissected, every ambiguity resolved as though audiences are no longer trusted to sit with uncertainty for even five minutes. And honestly, no wonder so many people struggle when they eventually encounter classics or older literature, because those texts often demand interpretation rather than immediate comprehension. They expect patience and attention, and they trust the reader to remain in uncertainty without immediately searching for a Reddit thread explaining what everything “really meant”. Sometimes I think we’ve become so accustomed to hyper-legible storytelling that anything requiring active participation now feels inaccessible when really it’s just asking us to slow down. I’ve written about this more extensively before, but I genuinely think our growing inability to sit with ambiguity is reshaping the way people approach literature altogether.

And maybe this is where my own bias comes in, because I studied linguistics and I genuinely love language itself, not merely storytelling as a sequence of events, and I love atmosphere and rhythm and books that force me to slow down and reread a sentence three times because something about it scratches at my brain in an interesting way, and novels that leave me slightly confused at first, discovering references accidentally and falling into rabbit holes, texts that assume the reader is capable of uncertainty, which is perhaps why I’m so drawn to older works like Dracula, to poetry, to Shakespeare, to writers like W. B. Yeats, where language itself carries atmosphere and emotional weight in ways that aren’t always immediately consumable.

And this is not me pretending I effortlessly glide through nineteenth-century literature either, because I still haven’t finished Wuthering Heights, thank you for asking, largely because every time I think the plot is finally progressing somebody starts screaming on the moors, while another dog materialises out of nowhere, and there are still, somehow, more dogs. But perhaps that’s part of the point, because not every worthwhile reading experience arrives neatly paced and instantly consumable, literature can frustrate you and drag and leave you spending fifty pages wondering whether everybody in Yorkshire required psychiatric intervention before you eventually put the book down for three months and come back to it later.

I sometimes wonder whether the reason so many people now insist classics are “boring” or “too difficult” is not because readers are less intelligent, but because we increasingly consume media in ways that train us to expect constant stimulation, immediate emotional payoff, and total readability, and we’ve become so accustomed to frictionless content that anything demanding patience now feels almost hostile, which is why reading older works feels fundamentally different from consuming content, and maybe that distinction is what I keep circling back to.

Because increasingly, books are not merely expected to be good, they are expected to be marketable identities, and people don’t simply read anymore so much as curate themselves through reading, shelves become branding exercises, books become personality signifiers, entire aesthetics emerge around appearing intellectual rather than engaging deeply with literature itself, and you can see this most clearly in the way “dark academia” became less about scholarship and more about candles, tweed, annotated copies of The Secret History, and expensive coffee.

And before anyone accuses me of hypocrisy, yes, I also romanticise books, obviously, because I literally run a literary platform and I’m not pretending to exist outside internet culture while typing this on the internet, but there is, I think, a difference between loving literature aesthetically and reducing literature entirely to aesthetics, because at its best reading should complicate you a little, it should occasionally frustrate you, unsettle you, bore you for twenty pages before suddenly producing a paragraph so beautiful that you have to put the book down and stare at the wall for a minute, and it should expose you to voices and styles you wouldn’t have chosen yourself while expanding your taste rather than endlessly feeding you slightly altered versions of what you already know you enjoy.

And perhaps that is what I miss most, the possibility of surprise, not optimisation or content or “books for fans of…” or novels engineered around virality and adaptation and market positioning and trope compilations, but simply the strange, private magic of finding a book by accident and allowing it to change you before the internet has the chance to explain what you’re supposed to think about it.