Books Are Hot
When I was growing up in the early aughts, if you were a certain type of person, being seen as “smart” or literary was decidedly uncool. If you can, for one moment, put down your dog-eared copy of Joan Didion’s The White Album, imagine a time where feigning ditziness was seen as desirable, perhaps even affording you a seat at the popular table. Oh, how times have changed. In 2003, it was the height of the paparazzi era, and the role models we looked up to were gossip-rag celebrities known for behaving badly, underaged partying, and distancing themselves as far from intellectualism as humanly possible. If mass media then, is a culprit for determining cultural tastes at any given time, let us look no further than what was playing on TV.
The Simple Life, a reality show that aired on Fox from 2003-2007, starred Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie, two fallen from-grace socialites, placed in scenarios that served as wilderness therapy rehab turned public spectacle. It was on the show that Hilton’s signature phrase, “that’s hot” was established as a cultural reference, setting the tone for the affectation of airheadism en vogue. When Jessica Simpson asked in an almost Shakespearan way, soliloquizing whether the can she was eating from was chicken or tuna, middle schoolers everywhere adopted the question as a personality type.
Kids used to be excited about flaunting Von Dutch hats and blinged-out Blackberrys, now it’s De Beauvoir and Babitz. All of a sudden, mass culture seems to be experiencing an “intellectual” renaissance of sorts, because literature is currently on trend.
The advent of social media gave everyone their own personal soapbox, and voicing an opinion on just about anything has become a prerequisite for maintaining relevance online. While reading was once a way to distinguish yourself as someone interested in scholarly pursuits or align yourself with alternative subcultures — a way to prove that you are in fact, different from the norm — books have been co-opted by capitalism in the latest shortcut in commodifying culture.
The covers alone symbolize an unspoken code — whether you bought The Second Sex to actually read or for use as a bedside prop, it has now become synonymous with the “hot girl” bookclub.
While it’s difficult to pinpoint the exact shift of tides, in 2019, the internet went crazy when Kendall Jenner was caught in a paparazzi photo (on a yacht, no less) reading a copy of Chelsea Hodson’s novel, Tonight I’m Someone Else. Don’t get me wrong, Prada bags and Miu Miu mini skirts are still in fashion, but so is the alt-lit title of the moment.
Books elicit a certain cultural cachet, an air of academia, an interest in the higher power of arts and letters. The covers alone symbolize an unspoken code — whether you bought The Second Sex to actually read or for use as a bedside prop, it has now become synonymous with the “hot girl” bookclub. The “book reads us,” Lionel Trilling wrote, and the ones we choose often say more about us than we’d like to admit. When everyone seems to be reading the same selection of De Beauvoir, Babitz, Didion and Moshfegh, it becomes unclear whether Valley of the Dolls, with its millennial-pink cover, was selected for its intellectual or aesthetic value, delicately nestled in the tableau of softly-burning Maison Louis Marie candles and Eames chairs.
The “bookish” trend has evolved so much that both the artsy and the elite are hiring “book curators” to ensure that their shelves reflect their aesthetic aspirations. It’s not just about showing that you read, it’s about showing that you read the right books; that you fit in with the right community.
We use our stylistic choices to hone what we think of as a highly individualized persona, yet pop culture and its silent engine, capitalism, “is a purely cultic religion,” Walter Benjamin wrote. Theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer echoed that notion, stating that the culture industry provides the “freedom to choose what is always the same.” While Instagram seemingly touts personal expression (individuality, creativity), one doom-scroll on the feed forces us to reckon with the homogenized infinity mirror that is culture. Social media, as it is wont to do, took the liberty of categorizing the “hot girl reading” phenomenon for us, naming the titles we keep seeing on every influencer’s bookshelf “hot girl books”.
For younger generations, the rise of BookTok ensures that every culturally-inclined Gen-Zer is adhering to a similar algorithm-friendly reading list (according to Bustle, the formula includes lots of sex, an aesthetically-inclined cover, vague whiffs of autofiction and/or a trending author). Reviewing Donna Tartt’s tome, The Secret History, one popular BookToker seemed to enjoy it, even though it fell slightly out of their tendency towards more contemporary novels. “The fact that it was published in 1992 made me feel like the book’s pseudo-intellectual themes were almost like, more legit,” she said. “The book kind of reminded me of like, required reading in high school, like Catcher in the Rye, but in like, a good way.”
The trendiness of literature (and its cult of personality) comes at a time when we are so oversaturated with materialistic consumption that it is perhaps one of the last few arenas that can remain relatively pure — you can’t really insert advertising into the actual pages of a book. While in the content itself lies an expression of artistic form, a peek into an author’s individual purview of the world, capitalism has managed to make the illusion of intellectualism available for purchase. It seems that knowledge can, in fact, be bought.
Keeping up with the Joneses now not only applies to what the Joneses have, but also what they’re consuming. The mindset is one in which, if we’re following Bella Hadid’s diet with exacting precision and reading from Kendall Jenner’s approved booklist, we start to think like them, and if we squint hard enough, we might get that much closer to becoming them.
Dalya Benor is a writer from Los Angeles, currently based in New York. She writes about art, culture, and the in-between, and has contributed to publications such as The New York Times, Vogue, W, Kaleidoscope, SSENSE, Dazed, AnOther, Document Journal, Office Magazine and others. She is currently getting her master's degree in Cultural Reporting and Criticism at NYU. Her latest project, The Pleasure Lists, is a community-oriented prompt for notes on pleasure. You can follow, learn more, and submit a list at @thepleasurelists.
