![]() It always has - Socratic circles in ancient Greece, serialized novels released in Victorian-era newspapers, and book clubs of all kinds suggest pleasure in the discourse. Reading for pleasure teeters between private indulgence and social practice. For him, “half the fun in reading a book now is getting to review it.” “I get satisfaction from marking a book as ‘read,’ from finding a book I want to read, from commenting back and forth on a review of a book with someone who’s also read it.” She’s been in a three-year-long text conversation with Stephen, another top reviewer, about Sally Rooney’s Conversations With Friends. She does not reveal her face or full name online, though she does show off her color-coded bookshelf. “Goodreads is almost a separate interest from reading,” says Emma, the site’s second-most-popular reviewer. I watch, and I am watched - by best friends and by Facebook friends from middle school - but I also catalog, reflect, and ideate. It is there, most glaringly, that reading is not for personal pleasure or edification but is instead for image-building. Instagram can venerate the book as a visual object and intellectual status symbol. TikTok turns self-published titles into bestsellers after enough tearful front-camera reviews. Twitter records the dramas of dropped book deals and controversial author takes, but can also be a place for writers to find an audience. The algorithm gives Ferrante fans links to textbooks in Italian.īooks have a certain place on all the other platforms. Now, ads for Prime shows splash on the home page. A San Francisco couple initially built it for their friends to compare the popularity of Dune versus Pride and Prejudice. Beige in every sense of the word, the aesthetics have essentially been unchanged since Amazon’s 2013 acquisition of Goodreads. The Jeff Bezos-owned site can be an ugly place to be. There’s a desire stirring in our culture, both in reaction to the digitization of life and in line with the trendy factor that digital platforms foster, to be seen as someone who reads overshadowing the reading itself. ![]() A prolonged period of forced isolation is one proposed cause so is the rise in easy content creation (meaning #BookTok). Since its launch in 2007, the “world’s largest site for readers” has transformed the consumption of books. The secondary social engagement is entangled with the actual act of reading, for me and 125 million other people. ![]() I felt clever and motivated and anxious, but ultimately an arbitrary pressure clouded the actual words on the page - I had to wonder: What was I reading for anymore? We did so the way we have since our teens: logging page-count progress, leaving pithy reviews, and reading theories from strangers, all on Goodreads. It wasn’t the content of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novel that divided us but how we proved that we loved it. One summer, I waged a war with my best friend over a famous book about friendship. ![]()
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