Against Readers

I've found that people who self-identify as "Readers" or "Book Lovers" tend to have a cargo cult approach books in that they believe that reading itself makes you better without reference to the materials being read, which is not true.

I would not be surprised if half the books at Barnes and Nobles are not worth the paper they are written on, and Booktok is a tropey*, pornographic cesspit who's consumers would be better served not reading at all.

People whose diet consists of these books are not literate in any meaningful sense of the term.

Actually intelligent and interesting people don't talk about books in and of themselves but the contents of books on topics they love**. A person who reads a lot of books about history may call themselves a history nerd. A person who reads a lot of philosophy may even call himself a philosopher. A person who likes science fiction will just say they like science fiction, but someone who is not interest in anything, and is therefore not interesting, will fetishize the object and say they "like books".

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*The Booktok "Community" has an appalling habit of describing their "literature" in terms of the tropes it contains and even writing to the trope. This is a bad habit they received from fanfiction sites. Lazy authors will use generic formulas in their work, but for these people the formulas are the entire point of the work.

**Antiquarians excepted