Something strange is going on. On the one hand, there are alarming signs about de-reading among the population. People have started to spend less and less time reading books, while the screens are filling up increasingly larger parts of our daily activities. As a result, alarming reports, whole ranges of views from the educational community, writers and the ‘Reading coalition’ who sound the alarm and write entire articles with reasons why reading would be so good for you, everything to promote that reading among the offspring.
It is not yet possible to demonstrate whether that really helps, perhaps because it seems unimaginable to me that there is a person who, after seeing Ronald Giphart ring the de-reading alarm, thought: damn, I’m going to grab a book.
Reading gloomy
On the other hand, there is the bookseller – that’s me – who, based on his own observation, has a slightly less gloomy analysis. The advantage is that I work in an English bookshop, while the majority of dereaders are grumpy day in and day out about the state of Dutch literature.
An average day in the English bookstore has the following phenomenon several times. You can already notice this at the front door, because we are dealing with hordes of giggling teenage girls who generate just a little more decibels than the average shop visitor. What are they coming to do? They come to buy English books that preferably have something to do with a gay prince, a murder, a teenage love or a sugary summer love in Italy. Preferably the covers are covered with glitter, bright colors and a sticker with ‘seen on Booktok‘ on top.
Booktok is a ‘community’ on TikTok app that popularizes reading as well as specific books
Apologies in advance for this modern nonsense, but Booktok is a “community” on the TikTok app that popularizes reading as well as specific books. I call books like The Midnight Library, The Seven Husbands or Evelyn Hugo and the book The Song of Achilles, a book that, miraculously, is now a bestseller as the book was published in 2011. All thanks to that new, hip social medium. The result is that we have more run-up and that these books are the most sold with us.
reading
I can already hear you saying: yes, but that is accessible English reading and not Dutch literature such as Couperus or Reve. That’s true, but weren’t we so gloomy about the reading in general? Since the phenomenon of the teenage mob in the bookstore has only been a thing for a year and a half, I am curious how this translates into the reports. In addition, with a copy of We Were Liars Often enough a Jane Austen, a Brontë or a Mary Shelley is bought (in glitter edition, that is). That is not a low-threshold reading, on the contrary. The wonderful world of the internet has so far not helped in countering the reading, but in view of the recent development I advise the publisher of a Cees Nooteboom to try out a glittery version of Rituals on TikTok.