In a viral clip from this year’s Oscars, Julia Fox (of Uncut Gems (/TikTok) fame), spoke to Variety about her upcoming “masterpiece” of a book. The defining moment of this interview came when reporter Marc Malkin asked about its genre.
“It was like a memoir at first, but now it’s just like my first book, you know?” she responded.
Cue yet another round of the internet’s ongoing obsession with Fox and her instantly iconic catchphrases. But alongside the many memes came a viral tweet pointing to the real question: do people actually read or is it all an act?
Writer Bobuq Sayed took to the app, saying, “Julia Fox is important representation for the girls who are enamored by literature but don’t read books.” The Twitter take garnered over 53,000 likes and over 350 quote tweets (and counting).
Fox’s celebrity-to-author moment comes in tandem with another viral instance of book-related chaos, courtesy of actor Ashley Tisdale. In a tour of her LA home with Architectural Digest, Tisdale inadvertently sparked a debate about books as must-have interior decor with purely aesthetic value, when the star revealed she had her husband go to a bookstore and buy 400 books to fill the sprawling empty shelves in their home.
Many people on Twitter — where everyone seems to be a critic — expressed bafflement at Tisdale’s confession. She later responded to the comments, tweeting, “Let’s clear this up. There are some of my books from over the years in there but yea 36 shelves that hold 22 books I did not have and any interior designer would have done the same. They do it all the time, I was just honest about it.”
Thanks to both Fox and Tisdale, the internet is now a hotbed of those confessing similar feelings towards books, once only made for reading but now deemed akin to a painting on a wall or an Instagram-worthy set of candles. After some deep analysis and close-reading across Twitter, the takeaway seems to be that the two celebrities (whether they’re reading books or not) actually do represent a growing demographic, those who like the idea of reading and the aesthetic of books. But the act of reading itself, perhaps not so much.
Posting the earmarked page of a literary gem on your Instagram story is becoming an act close to actually reading — and finishing — a novel. Here at Mashable, we’ve asked similar questions before. Mashable’s Rachel Thompson explored the idea of having every intention to finish a book, but just not reaching that point. There are a number of factors here, as Thompson notes some books are tailor-made for the Instagram cache with their bright, bold covers, while some boil down to hype. Sometimes a book just doesn’t resonate, and abandoning it shouldn’t make you feel guilty. Interest in reading also ebbs and flows, often dependent on how life just gets busy.
“Your Instagram or Twitter followers won’t think any less of you if you admit that you ditched a book you posted about,” she writes. “In fact, if they trust your opinion, they might feel inspired to freely admit when they’re not loving a hyped book. Honesty is, after all, the best policy.”
Close to a quarter of American adults say they hadn’t read a single book in 2021, according to the Pew Research Center. Time devoted to reading declined in the 2000s: between 2003 and 2016, the daily time spent reading dropped from 0.36 hours to 0.29 hours for Americans.
Yet, books continue to flourish in online spaces. Thanks to social media, books have long gone beyond the physical shelf to enjoy a lingering digital spotlight. TikTok’s shockingly large #BookTok community praises literature, dissects fanfiction, and has even resulted in certain major bookstores dedicating entire sections to the app’s recommendations. On Twitter, the hashtag #booktwt is regularly trending, with many users creating a community amongst themselves depending on similar reading interests.
Like much else to do with social media, it’s all about perception. And people like to be perceived as readers. Maybe its aesthetic value will soon translate to actually finishing the book (or 400 of them) that remain sitting on our shelves.