Philippe-Antoine Hoyeck is one of my favorite people on Twitter, and I wholly agree with his observation here: many of us fetishize the idea of reading far more than the act itself. We love the aesthetic, the identity, the literary persona we project to others, but not necessarily the hours spent actually turning pages.
I consider reading to be a sacred activity, one we desperately need to preserve. Reading strengthens our capacity for sustained attention in an age engineered to fragment it. It trains us in delayed gratification, building the neural pathways that allow us to sit with complexity rather than reach for the next dopamine hit. In a world of infinite scrolling, choosing to read is almost an act of resistance.
Yet I see so many people more interested in appearing to love obscure books, especially the classics, than in genuinely engaging with them. Let me be blunt: some haven’t even read the books they claim to adore. They’ve consumed a summary, skimmed an essay, absorbed the discourse, and now perform their literary taste for an audience.
My plea is simple: find the genres that actually move you, and engage with those. Set your own rules and rituals. Do not conform to Twitter trends or TikTok aesthetics. Whether you read 10 books this year or 100, the number is irrelevant. Read what genuinely resonates. It’s for your own sake, after all.
We are all doomed to an extremely brief existence. Do not squander it engaging with art that doesn’t speak to something within you.