Have Confidence
The Minutiae: in which I unfortunately touch on some hot topics
Welcome back to The Minutiae! This is a twice-monthly newsletter for paid subscribers, usually dedicated to whatever book-related topic is currently on my mind. To adjust your email notification settings, click here.
Sometimes when I’m feeling a bit tired and glazed—and because I’ve given up TikTok (maybe for good?) and don’t venture onto Twitter anymore (scary) and find Instagram pretty boring (sorry!)—I spend too long scrolling on Substack Notes. Whilst I have found many things worth my time on there, I have also found many things that seem designed specifically to annoy me. I’m trying to be less of a hater at the moment; I don’t really want every newsletter I write to be a response to something I’ve seen that I’ve been annoyed by. So, instead I’m being a hater today based on two pieces of writing that I did actually like.
Much (virtual) ink has been spilled lately on media literacy and people’s lack of it, even though we probably engage with media and text more than many of the generations before us. I don’t particularly want or need to contribute to that conversation, and I’m sure that some of it is overstated (at least as regards how much worse we are at it than previous generations). Yet something has been niggling at me about how people react to and talk about the books they read, which does (unfortunately) seem related. In many ways, it feels like a lack of confidence in how to consume and parse the books we read. Particularly books, I think, and particularly fiction because it is, in some ways, supposed to be an enjoyable activity. The idea that we might read something and find it enjoyable but that it also might be fraught with issues seems to make readers of fiction particularly insecure. Not to mention that you spend so much time with a novel compared to other forms of media.