My friends and I have taken to passing books around. Once a book has entered circulation, it becomes something to talk about, to refer back to. We absorb it into our group identity and use it to shape our conversations. What strikes me about this is that it doesn’t really matter if the books are good or not. One woman in the faculty lends around romantasy novels; another friend and I lend out battered copies of John LeCarré novels. Last year, we all read Middlemarch around the same time, and it now comes up regularly in conversation, as there are lots of useful ideas and paradigms in Middlemarch.
What all these books have in common is that we read them together, for each other. They are interwoven into our relationships and the shared world we make. This is a mode of media engagement that foregrounds sociability over things like enjoyment or taste. Our reactions to books may be different — we may argue about them, critique them, or use them as touchstones to talk about our own lives. It doesn’t really matter. The point is that, at the end of the day, these books turn us continually toward each other. The integration of the books into the social scene prevents them from being escapist. It’s not the books that dictate whether or not they fit the ‘escapist’ category — it’s the way we read them.
Escapism, as I described in this post, is a way of engaging with media. No book or film or whatever is inherently escapist — the way we read or watch it makes it that way. I think escapism is a very prevalent way of engaging with media. I often see people (online and irl) say things like, ‘It’s a book/film/show, it’s not that deep!’, or, ‘I love this fantasy book because it’s pure escape’, or, ‘In a difficult world like this one, why wouldn’t I read to escape?’ The escapist mindset cuts off the real world from the fictional, allowing flight from the former to the latter. Escapist media consumption is often justified as a way to unwind or de-stress.
To sever fiction from reality is to render oneself an entirely passive consumer when one engages with fiction. It also collapses the possibilities of what fiction can do: if fiction is an escape, it can only ever be a temporary ease or distraction from real-life boredom or pain. It’s not a problem to do this occasionally — sometimes I’m so exhausted that all I want to do is sit down in front of a silly, absorbing movie. What bothers me is the idea of escapism as an ethos, or a logic that undergirds media consumption as a whole. There are so many ways to be a passive consumer of media right now. I would argue that the escapist mindset is encouraged by most of the platforms on which we encounter media. Audiobooks, podcasts, tv shows on streaming platforms — it is so easy to set up a constant stream of whatever world I’d like to immerse myself in.1 I can put on a show and keep an eye on it while I do laundry, thus alleviating the banality of the chore. I can put on my headphones and listen to an audiobook while I run unpleasant errands. If I have an unpleasant day, I can come home and scroll through substack or twitter or instagram (social media, to my mind, is mostly a form of interactive content consumption, and it takes a lot of work to turn it into person-to-person interaction that is unmediated by this consumptive model). This is an obvious point, but the technology that marks all of our lives encourages us to do this. No platform or streaming service makes money off of my going for a walk, or talking with my friends, or slowly reading a book that someone has lent me.
If fiction is cut off from reality, then the best interaction with fiction that one can hope to have is this one of passive, easy consumption. The world of fiction doesn’t touch the ‘real world’, but instead becomes a kind of pale simulation that one can fall into. The sad thing is that this mode of consumption leeches color and joy from the ‘real world’, which becomes something to flee from. To be an escapist is to be nostalgic for unreality.
During the pandemic, without really thinking about it, I became used to doing just that — finishing a podcast episode and letting the next one play automatically, finishing a book and immediately wandering over to the shelf to pick out another one. I was alone and unhappy and I desperately wanted to escape the small room that had come to contain my life. I assume that lots of people have had similar experiences, but what worries me is that these habits have lingered, and can keep us isolated and passive. I don’t want that for anyone. I encourage everyone to ask how what you’re reading and watching could point back to the ‘real world’, and even become a part of that world. Could it push you toward the people around you, or help you imagine a future that is somehow better than the present? Or is the end point of the thing you’re consuming just another scroll through audible/netflix/twitter/etc?
This is probably controversial and I recognize that they have so many positive uses, but this is why I’m kind of suspicious of audiobooks.
I have a similar thing with my brother, and some people at work, always recommending books to each other, and it really does always provide fertile ground for conversation. Also, Middlemarch is the next "big read" I'm building up towards. I'm really looking forward to it.
I really like this idea of building a common universe, some kind of small private mythology to make bonds firmer and conversations deeper. How have achieved it with your friends? Was it natural from the beginning, did it build up and "formalise" after you first lended each other books casually? Or did you, in some way, collectively decide to put this in place?
The only time I did something similar with friends was when we were in the same class and therefore had the same compulsory readings... It's too bad we have not continued after we all split up and continued our lives with busier schedules. One thing we did was that we would have a "reference book", a copy in which everyone wrote notes, comments, jokes, etc ; it made a second reading much more enjoyable.