Nguyen is hardly alone in this experience. BookTok, the sprawling and informal literary community on TikTok, has pushed many people to read outside their usual interests. You don’t have to dig deep into X, Reddit, or Instagram to find reading suggestions that would never appear on the year-end lists in newspapers or magazines, or on the rolls of the major annual awards. Obscure literary titles are reaching people they might not have reached before.
But, if we accept Nguyen’s proposition, and conclude that some of us are slogging through fewer bad books and getting more quickly to the stuff we like, does that actually constitute an improvement in reading culture?
Let’s place our hypothetical friend Dave, the military-history buff, in a book club that requires him to read a whole bunch of books he might have never picked up—the majority of which he finds pointless and a waste of his time. The club also provides a community of in-person friends with whom he can debate and disagree and even argue about what book should be next on the queue. Dave might not read many more books than he would have without the club, and he may enjoy the ones he reads less; the quality of the information he’s receiving may even deteriorate. He might find himself back in the same Reddit threads, hunting down things that are tailored to his interests.
But there are social benefits to reading something together. Someone might be able to jolt him out of his narrow tranche of interests. The experience of reading can benefit from the rockier mental terrain that books provide; the boredom and impatience that longer texts sometimes inspire can help push and prod one’s thinking more than things that are perfectly distilled.
I asked Nguyen whether she felt that her vision of a more finely tuned and online reading public might obviate the need for the in-person book club or literary society or writing workshop. She said that although social media and learning about books through the internet likely accelerated exploration, it also could, in her experience, restrict people almost entirely to their own tastes. “You have the ability to create a filter bubble that’s more impermeable,” she said.
Social media does create a powerful consensus—on the internet, everything tends to grow quickly toward one source of light— and an argument can be made that a slower, more fractured network of in-person, localized arguments might ultimately offer up more intellectual variety. When I asked Nguyen about this, she mentioned the Ninth Street Women, a group of Abstract Expressionist artists who worked in the postwar period, and her own displaced nostalgia for the idea of artists and writers meeting in physical spaces with similar goals in mind. “It just inherently feels more vibrant if it’s in a physical space than if you Substack notes at the same time that all your friends are posting on Substack notes,” she said. But she also pointed out that such movements tend to be quite insidery, and that a lot of the most successful writers on platforms like Substack are people who might not exactly fit into the New York City literati. This seems undeniably true to me. It might be nice to go to the same bars and contribute to the same small journals and stare very seriously at the same art work in the same galleries, but such a life feels both anachronistic and annoying today.
In another of her notes for writers, Nguyen proclaims:
I have tried similar tactics in the past, especially when I was writing about specific subjects, such as education policy or A.I. But what I found wasn’t really a sharpening of insight, but, rather, a tightened focus on the social-media consensus, which was largely dictated by the people who posted the most on any given topic. Even in moments when I wasn’t writing directly about some tweet I had seen, I was still gesturing toward it. Writing, in this form, felt more like sticking a comment bubble on an aggregated stream of news stories, social-media posts, and an assortment of video podcasts. Most pundits—at least those who comment on the world in columns, newsletters, or on podcasts—are doing some form of this. Taken together, such writing forms “the discourse.”