Hi, I’m Erin, and I think I’m a reading snob.
Oxford is full of snobs. At least that’s one perspective. Drinking societies, white-tie balls, croquet on the lawns, candlelit formal dinners and the frequent use of Latin. You can see how it’s difficult to fight the allegations. Recently, I have come to fear that I, myself, also exhibit some snobbish tendencies.
Please don’t think that I say this happily, brandishing my snobbery with pride, wearing it as a badge of honour. It has actually been a troubling revelation, brought on by what feels suspiciously like a quarter-life crisis. The disturbing conclusions of my introspective research have been as follows:
Firstly, I am not as widely read as my peers, with some glaring gaps in my bibliography. Secondly, and relatedly, I ruined the act of reading by only allowing myself to pick up the books that me and my corner of the internet believed were supposedly worth reading. In other words, by being a snob.
Although I did enjoy many of the books I have read, I also definitely battled my way through some of them, and many of my prideful purchases remain untouched. A copy of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Les Mains Sales sits on my bookshelf, covered in a film of dust that I expect will never be disturbed.
I want to take you down this rabbit hole with me. Am I really a snob? Are you a snob? And if I, or you, or both of us are snobs, then how should we approach our journey of intellectual rehabilitation?
What is a ‘reading snob’?
‘How do I know if I’m a reading snob?’ I hear you ask anxiously. In my research, I came across a blogger who formulated a 6-step snobbery identification checklist:
1. You only engage with highly literary books and avoid commercial genres.
2. You refuse to read self-published works.
3. You avoid anything with the word ‘bestseller’ brandished across its cover.
4. You go in for gritty plots and aren’t a fan of feel-good stories.
5. You don’t want something easy: the more obscure and challenging the better.
6. You have an aversion to contemporary fiction.
At their core, a reading snob believes their literary tastes are superior to those of others. Most immediately recognisable is the reading snob who, as our blogger outlines, has an inflexible attachment to literary fiction. However, artist and writer M. Amelia Eikli has also identified what she calls ‘The Literary Populist’. This lesser-known snob directs their ire towards literary fiction, dismissing it as pretentious, inaccessible and unenjoyable.
In the book world, elitism is not confined to the few but is a sickness that infects the many.
The literary canon
Goodreads’ list of Literary Canon Books includes, in its first 50 entries, 14 books by female authors (Jane Austen features 5 times), whilst male authors account for 36 entries, or 72% per my calculations. Additionally, only two people of colour are listed: Toni Morrison and Zora Neal Hurston. Notably, these rankings were generated based on how often Goodreads users shelved each book under the heading ‘literary-canon’.
So, what does this tell us? Painfully clear is that the ‘literary canon’ – that list of texts deemed ‘worthy’ of being read – is dominated by works written by ‘DWEMs’ (Dead White European Males). Jane Austen’s repeated entries reduce the female authors represented to a scant 9. Even more disheartening is the lack of racial diversity.
Given this lack of diversity, should the literary canon dominate what we read? It certainly needs a bit of a revamp, I would argue. Although it would be unthinkable to do an English degree without covering Shakespeare or study History without at some point making acquaintance with Eric Hobsbawm, there is no doubt that these disciplines are in need of some variety.
I fell victim to the notion that canonical texts were the only ones with which I should engage – the others were unserious and less impressive. In bookshops, I would make a beeline for the modern classics section. These books were not just ones that I should read, but that I must read. Why? Because if not, I couldn’t be intellectual, cultured, or cool – or so I believed.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not questioning the quality of canonical books. I think they’re important works of literature. But I do find that the notion of a canon itself remains problematic. Who decided what the canon is? From our Goodreads statistics, we can infer it probably wasn’t women, and definitely not people of colour. It reproduces gendered and racial hierarchies where white men, predominantly from Western Europe and the US, come out on top.
Reading for (dis)pleasure
Although literary fiction will always remain popular–and that isn’t a bad thing–commercial genres dominate markets, with social media playing no small part in their ascendency. For far longer than I care to admit, I resisted BookTok. I was better than that, I assured myself. This misguided thinking came at a price – it cost me my love of reading.
Reminiscing on my tween-age years, I got thinking about fanfiction. Now more than then, fanfiction feels like a dirty word; maybe because reading it is ‘less acceptable’ in your twenties than your early teens. But even though publishing fanfiction has led to huge success for some authors – namely E.L. James, whose Fifty Shades of Grey started as a Twilight fanfic – the genre remains shrouded in a cloud of shame.
Now 22 and with a nearly fully developed frontal lobe, I look back on my youth as an avid fanfiction consumer with fondness. Caught in the storm of adolescence and all the horridness of being a 13-year-old girl, I could escape to the warm comfort of my favourite characters or celebrities reimagined in new spaces.
A reading snob’s redemption?
At the core of my snobbishness was an insatiable desire to be perceived as ‘cool’, whatever that means. I wanted to be the mysterious girl on the train reading Bulgakov. I constructed my aesthetic around reading Albert Camus and Sylvia Plath.
My reading was performative, and it tarnished this once-adored pastime.
So, if reading literary fiction really is your thing, then go for it! I still love a classic and can appreciate a more obscure plot or complicated character. However, to heal my inner reader, my mid-year resolution is changing how I look at books. These wonderful things shouldn’t be treated as accessories, nor should some be seen as inherently superior to others.
Fellow reading-snob-in-rehabilitation, go forth with an open mind and a willingness to get out of your comfort zone. You never know what you might like…