Issue 103: Reading in the age of digital abundance

Some thoughts on fighting consumer overload

The day before Christmas my husband and I snuck away to grab coffee and do a quick bookstore visit while visiting family in St. Louis. We went to Left Bank Books — the oldest indie bookstore in the city. The place is everything you want in a bookstore — a thoughtfully curated collection of new releases and backlisted titles, a staff of actual readers, a downstairs department dedicated entirely to used books, an impressive LGBTQIA+ section,¹ and last but definitely not least, a chill resident cat that was totally and completely aware of its own celebrity status. Honestly, they’ve earned their reputation.

What shocked me as I was making my rounds and running my hands through the various book displays was that nothing was really grabbing my attention. My eyes just sort of glazed over the titles — new and backlist alike. I would pause in moments of recognition but inevitably move on… like my brain was saying to me blah-blah I’ve seen it all before. I bought a book of scary stories for my 7 year old that I discovered in a dusty bin in the basement and then left without purchasing anything for myself…. something I never thought I could do. I was stunned.

2024 was an amazing year in reading for me — I read more than ever, wrote about books more than ever, I yapped about books with more people than I ever have before in my life. In December I read every single Best of / 2024 Favorites list on the internet — yes, I read and loved all of them. I did my own recap, I plotted things in Storygraph. I fucking dove IN. And… as I sit here just having crossed over the precipice of the new year, figuring out my goals and nose-ing into my friends’ TBRs… I think I finally am ready to admit:

I’ve had it.
I have reached complete & total book consumer overload.

Now. Don’t get me wrong. Somehow, miraculously, through all of this I do not feel any reader burnout. 2024 set me on a journey of reading more closely, more deeply, more idiosyncratically than ever before and I am more than happy to keep threading that path.

The part of me that is suffering is the consumer part of my reader brain. I am not done with books. I am just super tired of my primary relationship to books to be through consumption: buying books that excited me, procuring books that someone on the internet recommended to me, following the new release calendar, feeling deeply affected by how various readers / reviewers perceived certain books I cared deeply about, feeling pressure (self-inflicted) to get organized / keep a TBR, etc. while fully knowing that that’s not how my reader brain works… Need I continue?

If 2024 taught me anything is that cultivating a deeply personal reading life can be a transformational experience of self-discovery and building trust within oneself. The readers that I continue to follow and learn from are people who share their reading lives with the world but do so primarily as a form of self-expression and are intrinsically motivated. They don't just drop their Goodreads stats or post aesthetic TBR piles - they dig into the messy, personal reasons why a book moved them or frustrated them… sometimes knowing that their read will go counter to where “the discourse” is going. That’s the difference between sharing your reading life as a form of genuine connection versus curating it as a form of social currency. Authentic sharing builds you a community. Perfect lists give you an audience. It’s a fine distinction, I know, but an important one to me both as a reader and a writer.

So, in the spirit of staking a claim in my own intellectual destiny, I am sharing what I hope will help me resist the siren call of overconsumption in all areas of my life but especially in my reading life because I can’t afford to lose myself in it. Pun intended.

1| Book sourcing

I created this graphic below which outlines how I intent to go about procuring books in 2025. It’s simple, I know, but it felt important to me to articulate what I hope to be my North Star — buy new only as a last resort.

Spending mindfully is obviously a part of this — god knows that in house of readers the reading budget can really add up. But, more importantly, I want to be more mindful about where my attention as a reader goes and I know that if I am not proactive about it, I will squirrel all over the place and before I know it I will be following someone else’s (amazing, I’m sure) reading plan. I am turning 44 in about a month and let me tell you this — I barely have enough time to pursue my own goals and interests. I definitely have NO time to pursue someone else’s.

What I like about my pyramid is that it allows me to actually enjoy some of my past good decisions (the amazing books I’ve purchased, the library holds I’ve placed, the nerdy conversations I’ve had with book friends that resulted in book gifts or exchanges) while also leaving room for spontaneity and excitement. For example, there’s a number of new releases that I am SUPER STOKED about and can’t wait to pre-order. Also, I love a good moment of “cheating the system” when it comes to reading…. because that’s how I know I am truly excited about a book. One of my favorite reading memories of last year was sneaking out to go for long walks so that I could listen to Autumn by Ali Smith when I was “supposed to be reading Joan Didion.”

2| Amplifying your own weird, flagrant specificity

Rejecting overconsumption means literally slowing your roll. So many ways to do that — reading bigger books, taking time for annotation and reflection, rereading previously read books in search of new insight and perspective. I hope to do all of the above. But also, personally, I am thinking deeply about the reading projects I want to immerse myself in this year and resisting the urge of pre-interpreting them through the lens of what I will want to say about them on my Substack. I just read

Brandon

Taylor’s superb essay on the limitations of contemporary first person fiction:

We have a generation of writers who have watched more movies, television, and footage of human life than they have experienced of that life firsthand. Even their understanding and experience of their own inner lives originates in skits, memes, and video essays.

What Brandon Taylor says about fiction applies to so much of life these days. Our lived experience is so completely mediated through screens that we inevitably end up making choices based on how we expect we will need at some point to be representing those choices on social media. I know I am not the only book writer on the internet who at some point has picked up a book and decided not to read it because too many people have already reviewed it and…. well… the discourse has moved on. 🤦🏻‍♀️

Going forward I am doing none of that. I will continue to live by the wise words of Miranda July’s unhinged female protagonist in All Fours and continue to seek ways to amplify my own weird, flagrant specificity. Current projects underway for me include a year of reading Anna Karenina which will bleed in and out of a larger project on 19th Century Wives Under Pressure.² All year I have been not-so-secretly obsessed with novels about restless wives — not because it's trendy or marketable, but because something about these women's claustrophobic lives and desperate choices speaks to me in ways I'm still trying to understand. This is what I mean by following your weird, specific interests: letting yourself be drawn to what genuinely fascinates you, even (or especially) when it doesn't fit neatly into a hashtag or align with the current conversation.

3| Community, not competition

I know I need to pay attention and notice when FOMO starts rearing its ugly head. As I’ve written before, there are many forces at work here that compete with my idea of thoughtful reading and minding my own business. PR frenzy campaigns will come across my screen,³ bookclubs will get started that I won’t be invited to and I will feel sad about it even though… I hate bookclubs. But again, I will remind myself that:

The fomo is not about the new books but about wanting to be part of a community of readers and writers, about wanting to be seen and accepted as a reader and thinker, as someone who has interesting things to say. Buying stuff is how capitalism delivers belonging but if belonging is truly the goal, there are other ways to go about that.

In that vain I will continue to devour book Substacks… I know I am partial but I do believe that this platform has given birth to a qualitatively new type of book conversation that bridges the gap between professional book reviews and criticism and earlygen short-form book content (a la Goodreads, Bookstagram, and to a certain degree TikTok). I feel invested in the community we are building together around books and reading and THAT is more important to me than any one status marker that the internet has to offer, despite what capitalism wants us to believe.

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A question for you:

What's a reading interest or habit you have that feels uniquely yours — something that might not get many likes on Substack but brings you genuine joy or insight?

1. A good LGBTQIA+ section to me is always the mark of a place with a good heart.

2. The full reading list for this project is: Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), Madame Bovary (Flaubert), Middlesex (Eliot), The Portrait of a Lady (James)

3. R. F. Kuang new book is about to start hitting reviewers and there are only 200 numbered ARC copies. I caught myself lusting after one even though Kuang’s book is one of only 3 books I DNF-ed last year.