Fully concur with this piece published on Lit Hub
It’s the beginning of a new year and you might have seen, floating around on social media, lists like 52 Books To Read in 2024 or 42 Books That Will Change Your Life posted by Library Mindset, an account with 4.6 million Instagram followers. You might notice comments on these lists like “Omg I wish all this information was in my head.” You might notice what these books have in common: white backgrounds, almost entirely male authors, a focus almost entirely on business and self-help.
But this isn’t a column about diversity. It’s about more philosophical questions: What are books? What purpose do they serve?
It seems to me that there is a fundamental discrepancy between the way readers interact with books and the way the hack-your-brain tech community does. A wide swath of the ruling class sees books as data-intake vehicles for optimizing knowledge rather than, you know, things to intellectually engage with.
In a world where tech billionaires dominate so much of our culture, it’s troubling to see books treated like mere vessels for self-betterment the way that cold-water therapy and Fitbits are. Some of us enjoy fiction. And color.
I’m not saying that all self-help is bad. There’s always been an audience for short and snappy self-improvement books (there’s a reason why there are only 7 Habits, not 70), and that’s just fine. But I do worry about a larger phenomenon that I’ll call the bulletpointification of books and media.
A recent Blinkist post titled “7 Blinks To Understand the Conflict Between Israel and Hamas,” may give you some idea of the scale of such bullet point derangement.
There’s a reason why Paulo Coehlo’s The Alchemist is the favorite novel of countless numbers of corporate go-getters and celebrities. It’s a short, shallow parable about pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps, and it comes with some highly quotable maxims that can serve as inspirational action steps (for instance: “There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure”). The Alchemist is the ultimate message book, with easy takeaways.
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