Book Shaming: Why It Happens and How to Hold Your Head High (Even If You're Reading Fairy Porn)

A love letter to everyone who has ever hidden a book cover with their hand in public

    Congratulations, you've made it to the second post on this blog. Let's both celebrate. You, for your curiosity. Me, for actually writing a second post, which honestly puts me ahead of most New Year's resolutions I've ever made. After this, I think we both deserve to buy that book we've been circling like a shark for three weeks. 

    I've been seeing a lot of online discourse lately about the literacy crisis, and how reading has apparently dumbed down our whole society because people are more likely to pick up a "trashy" romance than a classic that actually challenges them. And here's my hot take, served with a side of side-eye: that's simply not true. Reading at any level, in any genre, on any device, is not what's contributing to declining literacy. What's contributing to declining literacy is people not reading at all, and not developing the reasoning, focus, and comprehension muscles that come with it. That's a very different problem, and it has almost nothing to do with whether your book has a dragon on the cover or a Pulitzer sticker.

    In my About Me post, I admitted that I sometimes freeze when a coworker asks the deceptively simple question, "So what are you reading?" That freeze has a name, and it is book shame, the literary equivalent of my mom eyeing the cookie in my hand and sighing, "Do you really think you should be eating that?" So instead of the cookie, I'd quietly eat the sad, 100-calorie yogurt I was raised to believe counted as a meal, thanks to peak '90s diet culture. Anyway…

So, What Exactly Is Book Shaming?

    Book shaming is when someone, intentionally or not, makes you feel embarrassed, inferior, or self-conscious about what you're reading. It shows up in a lot of shapes. A snide comment about romance novels. A smirk at your graphic novel collection. Others might just be projecting their own insecurities, or trying to impress you with their encyclopedic knowledge of 19th-century Russian authors. To those people I say: povezlo tebe, I know all the names of the dwarves from The Hobbit.

    This isn't a new phenomenon either, even if the term feels fresh. Genre fiction has been treated as literature's lesser sibling for well over a century. Detective novels, romance, and horror were all dismissed as "trashy" or "beneath serious readers" long before anyone had a smartphone to argue about it on. What's changed is the audience. Thanks to BookTok and Bookstagram, genre readers are louder, more visible, and, crucially, more willing to talk back.

Okay, But Let's Actually Talk About the Literacy Crisis

    I want to sit with this for a second because it deserves more than a snarky aside (petty with a purpose). National reading scores in the North America genuinely have been declining. The most recent NAEP data, sometimes called the Nation's Report Card, shows reading scores for fourth and eighth graders down since before the pandemic, and twelfth grade reading scores sitting at some of the lowest levels in decades. That's real, and it's worth taking seriously.

    Here's where it gets frustrating, though. A lot of the public conversation around this crisis quietly slides into blaming genre fiction, as if the kid struggling to read at grade level is the same kid who'd otherwise be knee-deep in Brandon Sanderson’ Cosmere universe, if only romantasy hadn't corrupted them. That's not what the research points to at all. Literacy experts are largely pointing at things like inconsistent phonics instruction in early education (the whole "science of reading" movement exists specifically because a lot of schools weren't teaching foundational decoding skills properly for years), shrinking attention spans driven by short-form video and constant device use, and pandemic-era learning gaps that a lot of kids never fully recovered from.

    None of that has anything to do with whether a teenager is reading Fourth Wing instead of Moby-Dick. If anything, a kid who devours 500 pages of romantasy in a weekend is actively building reading stamina, vocabulary, and comprehension, the exact skills the literacy crisis conversation claims to care about. The kid we should actually be worried about is the one who isn't reading anything at all, not the one reading "the wrong thing." Blaming genre fiction for a systemic education problem is a bit like blaming granola bars for a national obesity crisis while ignoring that half the continent doesn't have safe sidewalks to walk on. It's an easy target that lets everyone avoid the harder, more expensive conversation about how we actually teach kids to read.

    So no, your friend's group chat hot take that "nobody reads real books anymore" is not backed by the data. People are reading. A lot of people are reading a lot. The problem is a subset of people, often kids, aren't being taught the fundamentals well enough to read confidently in the first place, and that's an education funding and instruction issue, not a "romance novels ruined society" issue.

    Okay, climbing down from my soap box… temporarily.

The Made-Up Hierarchy of Books

    Book shaming happens for a bunch of reasons, but most of them trace back to one belief: that there's a hierarchy of books, with "serious literature" perched at the top like it's on a throne made of Penguin Classics, and everything else (romance, YA, comics, self-help, that one guy's third self-published memoir) ranked somewhere below.

    Some people genuinely believe this. Others are projecting their own insecurities, or trying to impress you with their encyclopedic knowledge of Dickens.   

    I've been on the receiving end more times than I'd like to admit. There was a stretch where I'd bring Moby-Dick to the coffee shop for show and leave my actual read, A Court of Silver Flames, safely at home, just in case someone glanced over my shoulder. Spoiler: nobody cares what you're reading nearly as much as you think they do. Side note, though, why does that particular book have to be the color of a traffic cone? I have questions for the cover design team.

Why We Do This to Each Other

    I think it comes down to a very human urge to sort and rank things so we can feel a little superior. We do it with music, movies, even snacks (I see you, people who judge grown adults for eating Animal Crackers at their desks). Books, carrying centuries of cultural prestige on their spines, are especially easy to gatekeep. There's a persistent myth that certain books make you smarter or "better," while others are just empty calories for your brain, junk food for the literary world. I'm very snack-coded, if you haven't noticed.

    Here's what's interesting, though. The sales data doesn't back up the snobbery. Romance remains one of the best-selling fiction categories year after year, and romantasy specifically has become a genuine publishing phenomenon, with authors like Sarah J. Maas and Rebecca Yarros regularly topping bestseller lists that used to be dominated by a very different kind of book. Readers aren't reading "less than." They're reading a lot, and they're doing it loudly, on purpose, in public, holding the book cover face out like a dare.

Audiobooks Count. Comics Count. All of It Counts.   

    While we're myth-busting, let's clear something else up. Audiobooks are not "cheating." Listening engages your brain, your comprehension, and often your emotional response just as effectively as reading print, and for people with dyslexia, vision impairment, or just a brutal commute to work, audiobooks are the difference between reading regularly and not reading at all. Same goes for graphic novels and comics, which require you to process text and image simultaneously, a skill that is genuinely more complex than people give it credit for.

    If you've been hiding your earbuds or your Sandman collection out of embarrassment, please stop. You're not reading wrong. You're just reading in a format that makes sense for your brain.

Reading Is Personal, Full Stop

    Here's the thing. Reading is deeply, unapologetically personal. We all come to books for different reasons. For me, it was a profound need to escape reality during a stretch of life when actual travel wasn't an option and my brain needed somewhere else to be. Some people read to learn. Some read to feel seen. Some read purely for fun, and that is a completely legitimate reason on its own, no asterisk required.

    No one gets to decide what's meaningful or worthwhile for you except you. If a story gets you through a rough day, week, month, or, year, cause no one told you life was gonna be this way (clap, clap, clap, clap), or makes you laugh out loud in a waiting room and startle the person next to you, that book has done its job just as thoroughly as any Booker Prize winner sitting untouched on someone's coffee table for aesthetic purposes only.

What to Actually Say When Someone Comes for Your TBR

    So… what do you do when someone criticizes your reading choices? First, breathe, and remember the mantra my best friend once told me: "You can't take the books with you to prison." It's easy to feel defensive, but someone else's opinion about your bookshelf says a lot more about them than about you. Maybe they were taught that only certain books "count." Maybe they're just having a bad day and you happened to be holding a book with abs on the cover. Either way, let them have it. You have better things to do, like finding out if Nesta ever stops being a menace.

A few responses that have genuinely worked for me:

🖤 Lead with humor. "Oh, I only read books where the men are seven feet tall with wings. It's a very exclusive club." Most people laugh. If they don't, that's genuinely their loss.

🖤 Keep it short. My therapist's personal favorite: "I read what makes me happy." Full stop. No dissertation required. That's what YouTube book reviews are for.

🖤 Invite them in. "I know it's not for everyone, but I love it. Want to borrow it when I'm done?" Sometimes people just need permission to admit they secretly want in on the fun. Come to the dark side, we have snacks. Okay, last snack reference, I promise.

🖤 For the truly persistent, pivot. A polite nod and a quick subject change works wonders. "There's a 30 percent chance it's already raining" has saved more conversations than I can count.

Let's Stop Apologizing for Reading At All  

     Every reader has a story about being shamed for their choices. Maybe you were told comics aren't "real books," or that you should've outgrown fairy tales by your age, or that audiobooks don't count. Here's my genuinely radical suggestion: let's stop apologizing. Let's celebrate the fact that we're reading at all, in a world absolutely engineered to keep us scrolling instead, and let's redirect the actual literacy crisis conversation toward the people and systems that can fix it, which is to say, not you, not your ACOTAR paperback, and not the color orange.

    As I tell my bestie regularly, "this could be drugs," which is admittedly dark humor given some of my own history, but if you don't laugh, you cry.

    So next time someone asks what you're reading, hold up that impossibly bright orange cover with pride and tell them the truth. People are going to judge you for something eventually. I've made my peace with it being books.

    Now, if you'll excuse me book nerds, I have a date with a young woman hunting a famous serial killer, and I have a feeling they're about to fall in love. Eek.

-  Poindexter Anonymous 🖤

Got a book shaming story of your own, or a hot take on the literacy crisis discourse? Drop it in the comments, I promise not to judge (I'm too busy defending my own shelves). And if you want more unfiltered book talk in your inbox, hit subscribe below, no dissertations, just honesty and the occasional snack tangent.