We Need to Start Treating Classic Literature Like Celebrity Gossip

The Performative Page Turn

If I see one more beige-filtered Instagram story featuring a pristine, uncracked spine of The Bell Jar resting next to a latte that has clearly gone cold for the sake of the angle, I am going to scream. We have reached peak literary gentrification. In our desperate attempt to keep reading alive in the age of algorithmic dopamine hits, we have inadvertently turned books into interior design objects. We have made reading a "clean girl" aesthetic.

This is a problem. Not just because it is annoying, but because it betrays the fundamental nature of what makes stories addictive. We are trying to sell reading as a vegetable, a virtuous, slow-living habit that proves you have an attention span longer than a goldfish, when we should be selling it as the candy. The internet does not run on virtue. It runs on mess. It runs on discourse. It runs on the specific, feral joy of dissecting human behavior.

The Dickensian Subreddit

To bring reading back into the pop culture vernacular, we need to stop treating the canon like a museum and start treating it like a subreddit. As an English Lit grad who spent four years analyzing texts that are supposedly "dry," I can promise you that Charles Dickens was not writing for the AP English syllabus. He was writing soap operas. He was the showrunner of his day, dropping cliffhangers that caused literal riots at the docks in New York as fans waited for the next shipment of magazines.

That energy exists today, but it is currently hoarded by the fanfiction community and reality TV Twitter. We see millions of words written about the interpersonal dynamics of The Real Housewives or the lore of Elden Ring. This is not a lack of literacy; it is a displacement of analytical energy. The internet loves "lore." It loves a deep dive. It loves a conspiracy theory. Literature is just compressed lore waiting to be unpacked.

Stan Culture as Literary Criticism

If we want to compete with TikTok, we have to borrow its language. We need to stop asking if a book is "important" and start asking if the protagonist is "gaslighting" the narrator. We need to apply the same forensic analysis to Wuthering Heights that the internet applied to the "Who TF Did I Marry?" saga. Heathcliff is not a romantic hero; he is the original walking red flag, and discussing him through the lens of modern dating discourse is infinitely more engaging than discussing his role as a Byronic archetype.

This requires a shift in how we talk about books online. The current trend of "book reviews" often mirrors consumer product reviews: rating the pacing, the trope, and the spice level. This is functional, but it is sterile. It treats the book as a content unit to be consumed. True engagement comes from parasocial relationships with the characters.

Make Reading Feral Again

We need to normalize the "feral reader." This is the reader who dog-ears pages aggressively, who writes unhinged notes in the margins, and who treats fictional characters with the same intensity we reserve for A-list celebrity breakups.

We are currently seeing a glimpse of this with the resurgence of fantasy series that inspire 40-minute YouTube video essays explaining magical systems. That is the blueprint. It is the "gamification" of reading, not through tracking numbers on Goodreads, which is just corporate productivity culture wearing a fake mustache, but through social capital. Knowing the lore should be the flex.

So, stop posting the aesthetic flat lay. Post the paragraph that made you want to throw the book across the room. Start a beef with a fictional character from 1850. Treat Dostoevsky like he just dropped a diss track. If we want reading to survive the algorithm, we have to stop making it look so peaceful. We have to remind the internet that books are, and always have been, absolute chaos.

#BookTok #ReadingCommunity #PopCulture