I’m sitting in a webinar with fellow librarians as representatives from big-time publishers pitch us their upcoming releases, hoping to land a place in our library catalogs.
My screen is awash in book covers as presenters quickly flip through PowerPoints, each as generic as the next: cartoony illustrations of couples over a solid-colored background for romance titles; moody, nondescript landscapes with a prominent sans serif title for thrillers and mysteries; a smattering of minimalist nonfiction covers, complete with your choice of inanimate object atop a plain white background paired with a sleek font.
The presenter’s blurbs for these books are even more insubstantial. Their descriptions either stitch together two subgenres or tropes (This book is romantasy with a friends-to-lovers storyline you can’t resist!) or pair two familiar cultural touchpoints (This book is like The Bachelor but with a cottagecore vibe!). Each selection is offered with the enthusiasm and expertise of a connoisseur recommending a sublime wine and cheese pairing.
As the webinar progresses and I struggle to retain both summaries and book covers, the publishers’ primary sales tactic becomes clear: This book will remind you of something else.
When someone says they love the aesthetic of dark academia, they do not mean that they spend all their free time reading ancient poetry and contemplating Baroque artwork. They likely mean that they wear vintage Doc Martens and thrifted sweaters over collared shirts, as it evokes the idea of someone who would spend their time doing those things. Maybe they enjoy the film Dead Poets Society, as it embodies this aesthetic while not actually existing within the hypothetical canon of dark academia.
Our current use of the word aesthetic has become completely detached from its original meaning. We refer not to a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste and with the creation and appreciation of beauty (as defined by Merriam-Webster) but rather to an evocative quality.
The list of aesthetics (or aura, vibe, energy, or whatever-core—pick your poison) is ever-growing, including but not limited to: dark academia, light academia, cottagecore, clean girl, that-girl, soft boy, boho, granola girl, and coastal grandmother. These aesthetics are not restricted to how someone curates their appearance—although that is the primary avenue for their expression—but also in all surface-level sensory experiences, from the broad strokes of music and home decor to the minute details of vernacular expressions and color palettes.
Despite this wingspan, these aesthetics rarely crystallize into real-life practices; to don them does not require any reckoning with their true substance. St. Augustine aptly asserts in Soliloquies, Book I, that “What is not loved for itself is not loved.”
We may have a Renaissance painting set as our desktop background and a growing collection of hardbound classics, but this does not necessarily mean we embody a lifestyle that engages the intellect. We are allured by the romance of well-weathered spines lined up neatly on our shelf, but not by the strain required to actually read their antiquated and difficult insides.
In On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books, Karen Swallow Prior argues that reading fiction is an essential component in forming virtue. Throughout the book, she connects various literary classics with the virtues they propagate, prefacing them with this wider connection:
Indeed, there is something in the very form of reading—the shape of the action itself—that tends toward virtue. The attentiveness necessary for deep reading requires patience. The skills of interpretation and evaluation require prudence. Even the simple decision to set aside time to read in a world rife with so many other choices competing for our attention requires a kind of temperance.
While reading’s popularity has surged once again through the influence of BookTube and BookTok, our approach to reading has been altered through platforms like these. Many book influencers utilize the same tactic deployed by the publishers in my webinar: recommending a book based on some other touchpoint. Algorithms rely on repackaging or referring back to what we already lean toward. Generative AI is even more patently utilitarian in this regard, rendering no limits to our whims.
As an example, a video titled “If you liked THIS Taylor Swift Song, You’ll like THIS Book” popped up on my YouTube recommendations just this week. I wonder: Will these books be loved for themselves, or will they be enjoyed merely for the sentimental immersion they offer?
Offering “readalike” recommendations is an essential skill of any librarian, but a good librarian will expand a reader’s palette and introduce them to new authors or genres adjacent to those they already love. Recommending more of the same leads to stagnant and eventually bored readers. Reading a book that reminds you of your favorite TV show is no more riveting than watching a TV show that reminds you of your favorite TV show.
To search for the reminiscent in what we read dilutes it to mere entertainment, forfeiting its formative and virtuous benefits that Prior describes. It is not enough to merely read, even in light of the harrowing illiteracy rates we are now facing. We need to read books that enrapture us out of ourselves and what we know. We need stories that stretch our imagination, not coddle it.
Good taste is reverence for that which towers before you, silent and steady. We cannot quite shake the truth that things possess real quality, and to recognize it is not hubris but humility, a submission to what stands before us.
Elaine Scarry calls this posture “radical decentering,” a step outside into otherness. In these surreal moments, we glimpse transcendence, and it looks nothing like us. We realize our contextualized human placement within the world. We cannot contain magnificence and beauty, let alone mold them to our fancies. Instead, we become the molded. We bend and are not overcome, but made more true.
One of my daily duties at the library is to empty the book drop of recent returns, which gives me an idea for what patrons read the most (James Patterson and Colleen Hoover are our frequent flyers). The book drop can often be homogenous, but every so often, an unassuming gem sneaks into the mix.
The book will show itself to me as I hold it under the scanner, my eye catching on either a distinct cover or a faintly familiar author. I’ll check it out to my card, and it may go unread in my locker until it’s due three weeks later. But sometimes it doesn’t.
It was while checking in returns that Rainer Maria Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God snagged my attention and followed me home. It captivated me with a language for the divine that is disentangled from cliché and painful connotations. Rilke—perhaps a mystic, perhaps an atheist even—miraculously offered me the first prayer I could find myself truly uttering in months in a time of spiritual desperation:
I want to unfold.
Let no place in me hold itself closed,
for where I am closed, I am false.
I want to stay clear in your sight.
These lines rerouted my journey back home toward the church. After months of ravishing numerous Christian books that left me bereft, I found relief in substantial and challenging poetry that I would have never known to look for of my own accord.
I’ve experienced many of these book-drop intercessions—some more pivotal than others—and through them, I am reminded that I am unaware of what I lack. In periods of need, mere sentiment does not do us any favors; referential content is not strong enough to bear the weight of doubt, ignorance, or arrogance. Reading in and of itself was not what I needed (for I was doing much of it). What I needed was a book that could reposition me.
There is certainly a need to readjust our approach to all media—movies, TV shows, video games, YouTube videos—but, as Prior outlines for us, literary mediums offer the most potential in shaping our very personhood. Reading is not merely another way to consume media; it is a practice that will train us in virtue and accustom us to humility.
A book worth reading contains years of an author’s toil, has weathered the fickleness and upheaval of times come and gone, and exists as an intimate relic of an experience we would not otherwise encounter. One does not approach such an artifact with flippancy. Reading these books will uncloak the biases of our time and the façade of our own knowledge. Good books will rattle us awake and bring the world into full dimension, pixel by pixel.
We do not need to read to become more knowledgeable, as we were once taught; we must read to experience our finitude. Might this alter the way we construct our reading lists, bookshelves, and library catalogs, as we reckon with their true potential? A single good book may offer us much, but even a lifetime of reading will still only graze the vastness of the human experience.
Through reading, we are invited to enter into these tensions honestly and creaturely, as Rilke did through the same poem that altered my life years ago:
I’m too alone in the world, yet not alone enough
to make each hour holy
I’m too small in the world, yet not small enough
to be simply in your presence, like a thing—
just as it is.
There is time yet to return to the simplicity of things, to know them as they are. There is time to be too small and too alone, yet not enough of either. A good book will guide you to this sacred tautness and acquaint you with this virtue-forming suspension once again.
If you let it, perhaps it will even leave you there, at the consummate threshold of humanity both cradled and bated.
Caroline Liberatore is a writer, editor, and librarian from Cleveland. Her work has been published with Solum Literary Press, Calla Press, and Amethyst Review, among others. She is currently enrolled in Bethany Theological Seminary’s theopoetics and writing program and serves as editor for The Clayjar Review. You can find more on her Substack, Dog-Eared Inquiries.
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