Karly

I’m going to make a distinction that probably won’t make me very popular on BookTok. Bookish isn’t the same as literary, and somewhere along the line the internet seems to have decided that they are. This entire post exists because I had that thought in the shower. I wasn’t trying to think of anything in particular, but somewhere between getting in and getting out my brain decided to have a small linguistic crisis instead. As someone who spent years studying languages, I couldn’t stop thinking about it because words don’t simply wake up one morning with new meanings. They drift, broaden, narrow and overlap with neighbouring words until people stop noticing there was ever a distinction in the first place. I can’t help wondering whether that’s exactly what’s happened here.

Historically, bookish and literary have never meant the same thing. Bookish has generally referred to a love of books or reading, while literary has referred much more broadly to literature itself and everything surrounding it, from criticism and scholarship to language, artistic value and intellectual culture. Open almost any dictionary and that distinction is still there. Spend long enough online, however, and the two words begin to collapse into one another. Anyone who talks about books is described as literary. Entire communities built around reading recommendations are labelled literary spaces. Book collecting has somehow become literary culture. As a linguist, I know better than to complain that language is changing because semantic change is one of the most fascinating things language does. What interests me far more is why these meanings are converging and what that says about the culture producing them.

What we now tend to call bookish culture is centred on reading as a hobby. It’s BookTok recommendations, beautifully photographed bookshelves, reading challenges, monthly wrap-ups, colour-coordinated shelves, sprayed edges, special editions and endless conversations about what everyone should read next. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with any of that. In fact, I’d argue that anything encouraging people to read deserves celebrating. Reading is a wonderful hobby and I’d much rather live in a world where people are excited about books than one where they’re ignored altogether. My point is simply that reading as a hobby and engaging with literature aren’t quite the same activity, even if they often overlap.

That’s probably my hottest take. Reading books and engaging with literature aren’t synonymous. Someone can read one hundred books in a year and never venture beyond whether they enjoyed them, just as someone else can spend six months with a single novel and emerge with an entirely different understanding of language, history, culture and storytelling. A reading tracker can tell me how many books someone’s read. It can’t tell me how they’ve read them. It can’t tell me whether they’ve thought about narrative voice, translation, historical context, intertextuality or why a story has survived for centuries. Reading more doesn’t automatically mean engaging more deeply, just as watching hundreds of films doesn’t automatically make someone a student of cinema.

I sometimes wonder whether the internet’s mistaken visibility for culture. We’ve become extraordinarily good at documenting our reading habits. We know how many books we finished this month, which edition has the prettiest cover, what everyone’s adding to their TBR and exactly which romance trope is trending this week. We’re far less interested in asking why stories endure, why one translation feels completely different from another, why an adaptation changes our understanding of a character, why a play written four hundred years ago still fills theatres or what literature can reveal about the society that produced it. Those conversations still exist, of course, but they’re quieter, slower and far less likely to be rewarded by algorithms.

That, I think, is where Nonsense & Lit sits. We’ve never been particularly interested in publishing endless recommendation lists or assigning books a star rating, not because we don’t love books, but because we’re usually more interested in the questions that begin once the book is closed. One week we might be writing about theatre, the next about journalism, then linguistics, then translation, then cinema, before eventually returning to the novel that started it all. None of those subjects sit outside literature in my mind. They’re all different ways of approaching the same cultural conversation, which is precisely why the publication has evolved the way it has.

The same philosophy shapes the interviews we’d like to publish. I’ve never been interested in interviewing someone simply because they’re famous. What fascinates me is hearing actors talk about interpretation, writers talk about craft, translators explain impossible choices, directors discuss adaptation and artists unpack the thinking behind their work. Celebrity has never really been the point. The work is the point because understanding how literature is created, interpreted and performed is just as valuable as reading it in the first place.

So no, I don’t think bookish and literary are interchangeable, even if the internet increasingly treats them that way. One describes an enthusiasm for books. The other describes an engagement with literature as a cultural, artistic and intellectual phenomenon. They overlap, sometimes substantially, but they aren’t synonyms, and pretending they are makes both words less useful.

My hottest take of all is this: the internet hasn’t made literary culture more accessible. It’s made bookish culture more visible, and those are two very different things. If bookish culture asks what you’re reading, literary culture asks why stories matter in the first place. That’s the conversation we’ve always wanted to have at Nonsense & Lit, and I can’t imagine us having any other.