Your wife can't read

On how reading today's popular books after a deficient education and years of not touching a book is fooling adults into thinking they have reading skills

Picture this: you make an account for a new book app because it looks prettier than the one you were using before. You are excited and start logging books you’ve read and want to read. One of those is Paradise Lost. After a while, the app suggests a review of Paradise Lost. The reviewer had given the minimum amount of stars (0.25) and written something like “I bought it because the cover was pretty but I couldn’t understand anything”. I gave it the benefit of the doubt, I am not a native English speaker and Paradise Lost was one of the hardest books I’ve ever finished, so I could understand that view.

Unfortunately, though, I am nosey. What else had that user read? They had read the usual BookTok suspects, Sarah J. Maas, Fourth Wing, Lightlark, and such, all given 5 stars and three standout titles - Paradise Lost, Lady Chatterley’s Lover and The Picture of Dorian Gray - all given 0.25. The reasons for that were all the same “I didn’t understand the language”. I couldn’t defend the user any more. I can allow for classics to be criticized, so many of them deserve it, but for Lightlark, of all books, to be praised, oh no.

It is a well-established fact that while the vast majority of people can read, their reading levels are quite low. As an example, the illiteracy rate is only 3.08%. However, about a month ago an article came out asserting that 40% of Portuguese adults can only understand simple texts and do basic maths. Portugal is a small country, but one that is very proud of its literacy rate (seriously, we won’t shut up about it), so I find this data very interesting and something that can be used to extrapolate broader data. People can read in most liberal democracies, but they cannot understand. And this is by design.

I was a reader since before I could read, I would chase family members with picture books around the house so they would read them to me. Repeatedly. After learning how to read, I always had one with me and was known to, expensively, finish one Rainbow Magic book on the drive to the holiday destination, never mind during the actual holiday. This love only briefly left me once - when, in the 12th grade, I was made to read “The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis” by Portuguese Nobel prize winner José Saramago - and I was heartbroken. I loved Saramago and had previously read some of his more challenging books, but the idea that I couldn’t interpret it as I went made it impossible to finish. You see, in Portuguese class, we would read the book first, and then the teacher would interpret it for us, we would essentially memorize this ready-made interpretation and were expected to regurgitate it in the final exam. It was annoying and I soon found that I would not memorize anything if I had built my own interpretation beforehand, so I simply didn’t finish it. To this day, I have no idea what the book says.

This story, however, demonstrates why people can’t read in this country. Most, if not all, of my classmates never read. The “good students” would do the assigned reading, sure, but they didn’t take any pleasure from it, then they would get to class and be told, categorically, what the author meant. People were not taught to understand, they were taught to say what the creators of the curriculum wanted to hear. But school ends, and you get to a point where you don’t have a curriculum to follow, you can either understand the news, contracts, laws, etc, or you can’t. And people can’t.

Amid this true literacy crisis, the second coming arrived, BookTok, with its shiny, fun and sexy books with formulaic plots and basic vocabulary. The readers rejoiced; a new platform where they could build community through their love of books, how beautiful. Well, no. TikTok is much more algorithmically driven than Instagram or Tumblr and so it demands feeding even more. You need to post 4, 5 times to grow, and book content simply cannot be created that fast unless you are reading tiny books at the speed of light. You can’t extract 5 easily digestible videos a day from reading Wuthering Heights or Paradise Lost, but you can do so when reading the same billionaire romance for the 6th time this month, find every ready-for-social-media, trope-fuel moment and make a video about each, bam 5 videos a day and you didn’t even need to read the description.

Earlier this year, a Brazillian booktoker was under fire for making a video on how she read three books a day by speed reading - that is, skimming. Other booktokers were enraged, especially after finding that she often gave books bad reviews because they “felt very flat” or because “she didn’t understand parts”. Well, the booktoker and I say, that’s what happens when you skim literature, I fear. But the backlash shocked me, as I had been attacked for saying things like “I don’t believe you are truly reading 400 books a year” in both English and in Portuguese BookTok spaces. I was accused of “taking the fun out of reading”, of “being jealous” and even of “not being a girl’s girl” (whatever that means anymore).

This got me thinking about how people in the global north, in the imperial core, see the world in comparison to those outside of it. We are so focused on our own little bubble of privilege, we have our heads so deep in the sand, that we find it good to mindlessly consume books. People in the global south, however, see it for what it is, trying stupidly to escape a world in which our governments are funding a genocide while we read about a girl throwing down her government because it was funding a genocide. We read our pretty little books because they are pretty or because all the other hot girls are reading them, not to learn, not to understand, but just because. This only catches up with us when we are confronted with a book that requires us to understand it, but in our silliness of “I have a uni degree, I can read it”, we give it a bad rating and keep it moving. We have been fooled, by questionable teaching practices and by children’s books filled with sexual content, into thinking we can read, but reading isn’t merely knowing letters and words, it’s gleaning meaning from complex sentences, it’s understanding the subtext, and that we cannot do. But, regardless, the algorithm needs feeding, you can’t waste time thinking about it, produce content, monkey, produce content.