How to Read Like a Human Being

Any kind of career art has long been considered a risk and a luxury. It’s certainly never been easy to get a novel published, but this is my modern requiem.

First you write a book. Then you edit it. You write it again. Then you pitch it. These steps are easier than ever with the pervasion of computers and the internet. But in counterbalance, publication swings further from every writer. The technology helps and it harms.

For example, the publishing industry is transitioning from traditional submissions to QueryManager, which is a submission form that allows writers to mass-submit manuscripts to agents, overloading them with queries. Plus, agents and publishers were closed to submissions during covid, causing a massive backlog.

But those are just practical problems. I don’t blame writers for writing more books. My bitterness fattens off the influence of virality and social media on commercial publishing. Even if your query manages to float atop the lake of submissions, procure a manuscript request, entice an agent, and sell to a publisher, you’re still subject to the modern hellscape of hype.

I think all of us have grown, in the past decade, to regard the “court of public opinion” with increasing dismay, as if it was a soiled child or a venomous snake. Social media has changed how we both ingest and form opinions, and even though I’ve tried to keep it at arm’s length, I feel its poison.

BookTok, the community of readers on TikTok, has become a powerful force in an industry that used to symbolize traditional entertainment. Books are the antithesis of electronic, short-form entertainment. In a culture where attention spans are shorter than ever, books are a way to detox from over-stimulation and over-consumption, to slow down and embrace quiet. Reading is a beautifully unique art form; it can stimulate dopamine without color, sound, moving pictures, or other humans. It happens at your own pace; when your mind wanders, your book waits for you. It is meditative and solitary. The author may begin the conversation, but once a book is yours, the conversation is only between your brain and the page.

NPR spins BookTok’s influence as a positive force in publishing with this simple comparison: “Word of mouth has always had a big effect on what books people read, and BookTok can turbocharge that process.” Reading that, I want to scream IT’S NOT THE SAME! Word of mouth conjures up two friends drinking coffee, one sharing how a book spoke to her heart, and the other recapping the insane plot of a fantasy she just finished. Word of mouth is personal and human. BookTok relies on flashy cover art and algorithms.

Every English speaker has heard the saying “don’t judge a book by its cover,” but on a 15 second TikTok of a white girl waving a paperback at the camera, there isn’t much else to judge the book by. When I saw F.T. Luken’s In Deeper Waters in Barnes and Noble, I caught my breath. With a sinfully beautiful cover and promises of pirates, I was head over heels before I cracked the spine. But its insides were underwhelming, made up of good elements that tend toward tedium and underdevelopment. I find this happening to me over and over with books that TikTok loves. With The House in the Cerulean Sea, Serpent & Dove, Throne of Glass — book after book whose author would’ve been torn apart in my writing program. Just as we’ve lost our connection to experts in news and science, we no longer rely on educated and experienced critics to tell us what books are worth reading and buying. We allow the young women of BookTok, who “prefer books that are passionate and emotional — and they like a good cry” (NPR) to tell readers and publishers what is valuable.

Let us harken back to the Writer’s Guild of America strike (my post here). By shrinking writing rooms, paying writers less, and kicking them off the show after a couple weeks, production companies can spend less and pump out more shows. There are shows like The Last of Us, which I watched with Nick every week, glued to the couch and wide-eyed with anticipation. There are shows like Riverdale, which played on my TV while I scrolled on my phone and rolled my eyes at the dialogue. And there are copious shows like Riverdale available on streaming services.

Whether it’s clothes, Amazon gadgets, books, or television, we have become really good at consuming. In my house right now, I have everything I need. I can’t picture something I’d buy in the next six months. But Google and Facebook know fifty things I want to buy, and they will advertise them to me every time I check my phone. The internet is an endless and insidious commercial, and social media is the NASCAR of advertising.

The BookTok mechanism relies on reading as many books as possible, as quickly as possible. Creators need to pump out content, giving their audience a consumerist’s favorite thing: endless options. Publishing is a business, after all, and the people buying books are young, wealthy, white women with their own miniature Barnes and Noble. They can afford to fill their shelves with books they will read once and then use as colorful décor, teaching publishers that what sells is a beautiful cover and a quick, easily digestible story. A book like The Idiot (Elif Batuman) is too dense, too literary, too plain-clothed. So instead, in the same way Netflix pumps out vapid, glittery content for us to consume, BookTok promotes books that leave you hungry, disappointed, and $20 poorer.

But an even more sinister influence lurks in the bones of BookTok, one even more inhuman than turbocharged word-of-mouth: The Algorithm. In this age of algorithm-controlled content filtering, many social media users grow concerned about the echo-chamber effect and the death of unbiased news feeds.

In his article BookTok’s Racial Bias, Tyler McCall says, “TikTok’s [algorithm] creates an echo chamber that incentivizes users to keep something popular in the conversation rather than create content about something new.” An algorithm learns what you like, shows you what you like, ingrains what you like. An algorithm greases the wheels of confirmation bias without unction. It doesn’t know what it’s telling you, or your children. It only knows what you click and how long you watch it.

It feels like there’s an algorithm for everything now, and not every user wants corporate personalization. I, for one, hate Google’s personalized ads. Because of my age and gender, Google feeds me non-stop dieting ads. No matter how quickly I skip them, no matter how many times I click “see less ads like this,” they do not stop. Whatever part of the algorithm decided that I need dieting apps, programs, and products is too powerful.

Have personalized ads and algorithms become your default? How often do you find yourself mindlessly clicking “allow” on apps and websites? In a recent update, Apple introduced a screen that allows users to click “Ask App Not to Track.” Now when faced with that pop-up, I realize there are apps I’ve had for years and never realized they collected my data.

I don’t bring this up for the sake of online privacy. That’s an entirely different conversation, one I’m not invested in. I bring up data tracking because I think widespread personalization is dangerous.

I’ve outlined two reasons: facilitated over-consumption and the echo-chamber effect. If this measureless personalization concerns you, let me offer an antidote: randomness. It is a uniquely human method. Furthermore, random often means equal. Something random can be surprising, funny, and even magical.

The fact that a computer cannot replicate true randomness is, in itself, a testament to the value of randomization. My appreciation for lava lamps has multiplied ever since I took Intro to Computer Science (the lava flow is infinitely unpredictable!). Anything we humans can gatekeep from AI is beautiful in my book.

But even near-randomization is valuable. I’ve been a Spotify Premium subscriber for years, and I’ve hated their shuffle algorithm ever since it changed from near-random. Gabi Belle has a great video explaining how Spotify’s shuffle works, and what a human actually wants a “shuffle” button to do.

If it was based on how many times you listened to the track, this is what would happen. The playlist front-loads the same songs every time, so I'll inadvertently have listened to "Twinleaf Town" so many times that it shows up on my Spotify wrapped. Making it even more popular with me, then Spotify thinks I really, really like this song, so it shows me this song even more times.

Gabi’s hypothetical example shows my issues with personalization. I’m not a software engineer, obviously. I don’t know the intricacies of billion-dollar algorithms. But I know this: randomness guarantees that no code is teaching me what to like.

So here’s what I want you to do. Don’t listen to BookTok. Cultivate your own near-randomness. Go to a thrift store or a Barnes & Noble, pick up a book, and read the first page. Do it until you feel something in your incredibly human heart. I hope, with my soul, that you find something magical, surprising, and far more personal than an algorithm could ever give you.