By: Zainab Salam, Opinions Editor
You’ve probably witnessed it before — someone suggesting, with smugness only a self-proclaimed intellectual can summon, that reading authors like Dostoevsky is the only proper way to engage with true literature. I say this as someone who has spent many nights trying to parse the meaning of a single sentence in a Hannah Arendt essay. But I also say this as someone who reads murder mysteries under the cover, devours romance novels in one sitting, and has fallen in love with the main character in a certain YA book with a blue cover. Reading shouldn’t be pretentious — it should be joyful.
Reading isn’t only for growing your vocabulary or building on your philosophy of life. It’s also for resting, for living vicariously through fictional characters. There’s a strange kind of snobbery that still haunts reading culture — a belief that books must be difficult to be meaningful. How very Dorian Gray of us. Somehow, enjoyment is seen as less noble than suffering and analysis. But, to me, joy is a serious business.
When we dismiss books that center romance or rely on cliché tropes, we risk losing the emotional immediacy that first made many of us fall in love with books in the first place. Remember your very first book as a kid? When you had to sneak some kind of light source under the blanket, so you could read well past your bedtime?
What a gift it is to be gripped by a page-turner — to feel your heart race as a detective edges closer to danger.
What a blessing to see two characters find their way back to each other, despite every odd, and to believe in love. What a relief it is to escape. To read widely is to honour all the parts within us: the thinkers, the dreamers, the escapists, the romantics. No single genre can feed the whole self.
The hierarchy of reading also deepens existing divides — classist and elitist ones. When particular genres are diminished, it’s as if the reading community is reinforcing the idea that only certain voices, certain aesthetics, and certain readers belong.
So yes, read your Simone de Beauvoir. Read your Nawal El Saadawi. Read your Maya Angelou. But also read your cozy mysteries and beach romances. Let your reading diet be as varied as your moods. Let your bookshelf hold life in its many forms and variations. At the end of the day, what matters most about your book is how it made you feel.
