Post-election, #BookTok entered the political fray, and many media outlets took notice when popular accounts claimed that they were apolitical and that icky politics shouldn’t enter into reading spaces. More critically engaged #BookTok accounts and book influencers on a variety of other platforms pushed back on the notion that reading can or should be apolitical.
Nathan Shuherk aka Schizophrenic Reads captured this brilliantly on his Substack post, “On the Politics of BookTok.” His take on the book influencers who decried addressing or acknowledging politics is spot on:
“These readers want to be left alone to enjoy their non-political books about a young woman that leads a revolution to overthrow a tyrant king or the witch that slays those damned dragons that cannot stop themselves from accumulating everything of value or something more relaxing like the cute and comforting love between two teenage boys. These readers spend hours and hours looking at pages without reading. They’ve devoted their finances and entire persona to becoming a reader, but they don’t understand the stories they’re ravenously consuming. They cling to escapism, not because they want to quiet their minds from the cacophony of breaking news stories of cities being washed away in floods and the screams of children massacred in a genocide, but because they’re escaping from thinking. They pour over pages and pages and don’t know what they’re reading. They might be able to define the words on the page, but they certainly don’t understand what a story is . . . or what stories can and should be.”
While there are many reasons that people read, many moods and emotional experiences that reading meets, and readers’ advisors are charged to help readers meet those moments with the stories that will entertain and engage them most, none of this is done in a neutral zone where politics do not exist. The bookish account Ad Astra does a good job of pointing out concretely the ways in which all reading, all publishing, and all books are political. In a recent Instagram post, Ad Astra said that thinking your reading isn’t political only makes it more so: “You’re choosing to actively ignore all of the factors that go into your ability to access that book, the author’s writing of that book, and the book’s publication. Ignoring these factors is a privilege.”
Those that want to believe their reading is not political want to retreat to a world in which none of their choices are socially informed or make societal impacts, but they are and they do. (One only need to look at the overwhelming whiteness of the Goodreads Best Books of 2024 winners, awarded via user polls.) It is political that publishing predominantly provides books by white authors centering white characters. Not seeing how this remains the default in publishing or reading blithely without engaging with the normative defaults in society and publishing does not free readers from the powers that have enabled and supported this reading experience.
In How To Read Now, Elaine Castillo addresses this more bluntly: "White supremacy makes for terrible readers, I find. The thing is, often when people talk about racists, they talk in terms of ignorance. They're just ignorant, they say. Such ignorant people. I'm sorry, my grandpa's really ignorant. That was an ignorant thing to say. What an ignorant comment. We're besieged on all sides by the comforting logic and pathos of ignorance. It's logic that excuses people--bad readers--from their actions; from the living effect of their bad reading. Most people are not, in fact, all that ignorant, i.e., lacking in knowledge, or simply unaware. Bad reading isn't a question of people undereducated in a more equitable and progressive understanding of what it means to be a person among other people. Most people are vastly overeducated: overeducated in white supremacy, in patriarchy, in heteronormativity. Most people are in fact advanced in their education in these economies, economies that say, very plainly, that cis straight white lives are inherently more valuable, interesting, and noble than the lives of everyone else; that they deserve to be set in stone, centered in every narrative. It's not a question of bringing people out of their ignorance--if only someone had told me that Filipinos were human, I wouldn't have massacred all of them!--but a question of bringing people out of their deliberately extensive education."
Shouldn’t our work with readers challenge white supremacist status quo in publishing? Actively anti-racist practitioners of RA believe that our mission is bound up in challenging systemic inequity and that diversifying our own reading habits and tastes and those of our readers are aligned to serving the reader.
Rutgers Assistant Professor E. E. Lawrence’s recent paper, “Of acquisitions and interference: accounting for systemic threats to the freedom to read,” posits that the inequity baked into publishing, as also supported by “comps,” infringes on the freedom to read; readers already do not have a wide availability of the choices they should have due to the very nature of inequity in publishing. Lawrence says:
“Here, greater freedom is positively correlated with a greater diversity of options, and so racial inequality operates as a constraint on both. The problem and its remedy are then matters of distribution, in the sense that they must redress the improper allocation of material resources (either directly through books produced or indirectly through the constitution of the workforce). Put simply, if the central issue for the reader is inadequate diversity of available titles, the solution is to increase that diversity: to find or publish titles that fill in the relevant gaps (see ALA, 2017, 182/2019). The library thus performs a kind of corrective function, countering racial disparities in the marketplace by supplying texts by those authors that the mainstream publishing industry excludes, and so restoring the material conditions necessary to sovereign consumption.”
A commitment to actively anti-racist readers’ advisory asks us to acknowledge our role as a corrective in a publishing industry and society which has been historically and currently inequitable. This means acknowledging that all reading is political, and that all books are imbued with the context of the moment and the market in which they are created.
I work in a city with a beloved adult summer reading program that just celebrated its 10th year. One of the chief values it has upheld over the years (and this can be objectively observed) is to stretch readers to try new things–new genres, new authors, books written by people with different lived experiences, and more. In essence, this has been a program designed both to engage and activate adult readers over the summer, but it was also designed with addressing inequity in publishing and book marketing in mind. So, when readers comment online that they want fewer social justice categories, for example, it underscores the very issues that emerged in BookTok spaces following the election.
Some people want to read for “fun” and do not equate reading diversely as “fun.” The diversity they seek to avoid, but rarely name, are books written by or about people who are not white, cis, heterosexual, or able-bodied. Many readers do enjoy exploring new genres and crave representation and even social critique in their reading; for many readers, challenging themselves and trying new things,and even problematizing their worldviews, can provide unexpected rewards and delight.
Why, then, do readers think that enjoyment or even “vibes” can’t be found in books that might also challenge them? Some readers are not interested in reading books that will not make them think or question, or reconsider, or that do not center and validate their experiences. We can help those readers find what they enjoy, but there is also a whole apparatus of publishing and marketing geared to helping them. My colleague Genesee Rickel put it this way: “No one says you can't read for fun, or read mostly (if not all!) lighthearted stories. If you think you can only find these stories by and featuring white characters, that's the problem. Humans contain multitudes, and even at our lightest and fluffiest, we are political. Our societies are governed by political structures and politically-influenced interpersonal dynamics. It just is. Claiming this to not be the case highlights a certain lived experience that is still backed up by politics - an existence of white (and perhaps other) privilege.”
My friend Katie Baker added: “And I guess my question is why so many people want to avoid politics altogether when for so many people existing is political.” There is nothing wrong with reading for escape and reading as escapism is important. Margaret Killjoy recently wrote about the value of escapism, quoting Tolkein and Le Guin on their thoughts on the importance of escapism. But if all you want, in all of your reading, is to escape witnessing the pain and suffering of others, that is a different matter altogether.
Readers’ advisory has a history of neutrality that started with the very noble task of dismantling snobbery towards leisure readers. But neutrality is not a place we can remain in an inequitable society. I am not saying that there is one way to approach readers’ advisory by any means, but ameliorating some of the corrosive notions at the heart of our culture–like racism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, fatphobia, ableism, anti-Semitism, and more—should be discussed and considered in our work with readers. We can validate the reader, help them find their next good book, while also pushing back in small ways on notions that work against a pluralist understanding of belonging in our communities.
I will leave you with bookseller Josh Cook’s thoughts, from his chapbook/zine, The Least We Can Do: White Supremacy, Free Speech, and Independent Bookstores (also contained in his book The Art of Libromancy):
"Through staff picks, shelf-talkers, displays, events, recommendations, conversations with readers, and on all of our platforms both physical and digital, booksellers should advocate for marginalized voices and communities, center own voices, guide readers to the books and authors that will help them grow and develop as readers, take risks to bring attention to books that might make some readers uncomfortable, use books to show how big the world is, be willing to lose the occasional sale because you have been honest with your readers about a book or an author, respect your readers' intelligence in what books you talk about and how you talk about them, and talk back to publishers and other media in ways that develop and support that vital national discourse. Every shift, every single shift, at an independent bookstore is an opportunity for antifascist, antiracist, anti-supremacist, and anti-misogynist advocacy. What a privilege that is.”
Let’s keep talking about how our work with readers is politically and socially situated. What can we do to expand the freedom to read by using our sphere of influence to affect publishing and reading? Let’s keep interrogating the nature of our work, and what it might look like in the future. In her recent book, The Serviceberry, Robin Wall Kimmerer wrote: “We live in the tension between what is and what is possible.”
What a privilege, indeed.
