There is a particular loneliness that settles in when you scroll through a feed of perfect bookshelves. Spines arranged by colour, a blush-to-aubergine gradient, a single dried peony resting on a stack of pristine hardcovers. A steaming mug—ceramic, handmade, the sort that costs more than the books beneath it—sits just so, the foam art still holding its shape. I know this image. I have, in weaker moments, tried to recreate it. And every time, I feel the same quiet ache: a sense that my own reading life, with its cracked spines and tea-stained pages and books piled on the radiator, is somehow less real.
I am Maren Lindqvist-Berg, and I have spent my professional life in the stacks. First as a librarian in a small Swedish town where the winter light barely reached the windows, and now in Toronto, where I write about the emotional and ethical weight of what we read. My training is in library science, a field that taught me to see a book as a social object, a node in a network of readers, histories, and quiet needs. But nothing in my training prepared me for the way Bookstagram—the sprawling, visually driven book community on Instagram—has reshaped what it means to be a reader in public. This is not a screed against social media. It is an attempt to name a specific kind of sadness I see in the gap between the image of reading and the act itself.
The Aesthetic as a Form of Erasure
Let me be precise about what I mean. The problem is not beauty. I am a Swedish Canadian who grew up in homes where light and wood and negative space were a kind of moral language. I understand the impulse to make a corner of the world orderly and lovely. The problem arises when the aesthetic becomes a prescriptive grammar of reading, one that quietly erases the messier, more private ways we actually live with books.
Bookstagram, at its most influential, presents reading as a lifestyle accessory rather than a practice. The books are often new, their jackets unblemished. They are arranged in stacks that signal taste and cultural capital. The reader’s hands, if they appear, are manicured, holding a book open in a way that would crack the spine of any paperback I have ever loved. This is not a documentation of reading; it is a performance of having read, or more accurately, of being the kind of person who reads. The distinction matters. When we perform reading, we shift the focus from the internal, often unruly experience of engaging with a text to the external, manageable surface of the object. The book becomes a prop.
In my library science training, we talked a great deal about the book as a material object—its paper, its binding, its typography, its smell. These are not trivial things. The physicality of a book shapes how we encounter a story. A mass-market paperback with yellowed pages and a cracked spine carries the evidence of previous readers, a kind of tactile palimpsest. A hardcover with a sewn binding invites a slower, more deliberate pace. But the Bookstagram aesthetic flattens this materiality into a single, glossy surface. The book becomes an image of a book, and the image is what circulates, what is liked, what is sold.
The Ethics of the Flat Lay
Consider the flat lay, that quintessential Bookstagram composition. A book is placed on a textured background—a knit blanket, a wooden table, a linen sheet—surrounded by carefully chosen objects: a sprig of eucalyptus, a pair of tortoiseshell glasses, a candle that has never been lit. The book is often open, but the pages are blank or show a generic block of text. The reader is absent. The act of reading is absent. What remains is a still life of aspiration.
This is not a neutral arrangement. It teaches us that books are to be displayed, not necessarily engaged with. It suggests that the value of a book lies in its visual coherence with a personal brand. And it creates a subtle but persistent hierarchy: some books are photogenic, and some are not. A worn copy of a Swedish crime novel, its cover lurid and its pages soft as felt, will never perform well in this space. A lyrical work of literary fiction with a minimalist cover and deckled edges will. The algorithm rewards the image, and the image rewards a certain kind of book—often one that is already privileged by the publishing industry’s marketing budgets.
I think of the immigrant and working-class readers I have known, the ones who kept their books in milk crates or on windowsills, who read to survive winter or to understand a new country. Their reading lives would be invisible on Bookstagram, not because they are less passionate, but because they do not conform to the aesthetic. This is a quiet violence: the erasure of reading practices that do not photograph well.
The Emotional Cost of Curated Reading
There is a deeper, more personal cost to this aesthetic regime. It trains us to see our own reading habits as inadequate. I have spoken to young readers who feel ashamed of their dog-eared pages, their marginalia in ballpoint pen, their habit of reading in bed with a bag of chips. They have internalized the message that reading should be a clean, photogenic, and above all, productive activity. The Bookstagram feed, with its monthly TBR piles and reading challenges and colour-coded shelves, turns reading into a form of optimized self-improvement. We are no longer just readers; we are content managers of our own literary lives.
This optimization impulse has a particular emotional texture. It is anxious, comparative, and oddly lonely. When we curate our reading for an audience, we lose the private, unruly space where a book can change us without anyone watching. The Swedish concept of tystnad—a deep, resonant silence—is essential to my own reading life. It is in that silence that a book can unsettle me, bore me, thrill me, or leave me confused for days. None of that fits into a caption. None of it can be photographed.
The Vulnerability of Taste
I want to be careful here. I am not arguing that sharing books online is inherently shallow. I have discovered extraordinary writers through Bookstagram, voices from the margins that traditional review outlets ignored. The community can be generous, passionate, and deeply knowledgeable. But the aesthetic—the visual grammar that dominates the platform—exerts a homogenizing pressure. It trains us to value books for their sign value rather than their capacity to unsettle, to bore, to wound, or to heal.
There is an ethical dimension to this. When we present our reading lives as a series of beautiful objects, we are also presenting a version of ourselves: cultivated, tasteful, in control. But real reading is an act of vulnerability. It requires us to admit what we do not know, to sit with discomfort, to be changed by another person’s words. The Bookstagram aesthetic, with its emphasis on curation and control, can make that vulnerability feel like a failure. It can make us forget that the most important reading experiences are often the ones that leave no pretty trace.
What Library Science Teaches Us About Reading Communities
My training in library science gave me a different lens. In the Swedish library tradition, the goal is not to promote the “best” books but to ensure that every reader can find their book—the one that meets them where they are, in their own language, at their own level of need. This is a radically democratic vision of reading. It has no room for the hierarchies of taste that Bookstagram often reinforces.
I remember a patron, an elderly man who came to the library every Tuesday. He read only westerns—cheap paperbacks with lurid covers and predictable plots. He was not a “good” reader by any literary standard. But those books were his companions through a long grief. They gave him a structure, a familiar rhythm, a world where justice was possible. His reading life was rich and necessary, but it would be invisible—even embarrassing—in the curated feeds of Bookstagram. This is the loss I feel when I scroll: the loss of a reading culture that makes room for the westerns, the romances, the self-help books with cracked spines and earnest underlining.
Library science also teaches us about information ecosystems. A healthy reading ecosystem needs diversity—not just of authors and genres, but of reading practices. It needs readers who annotate and readers who never mark a page. It needs books that are cherished and books that are read once and passed on. It needs public libraries and secondhand bookshops and kitchen tables piled high. When one platform, driven by one visual logic, comes to dominate the public imagination of what it means to be a reader, the ecosystem narrows. We lose the very practices that make reading a lifeline for so many.
The Swedish-Canadian Perspective: Light and Shadow
My own reading life is shaped by two landscapes: the long, dark winters of Sweden, where reading was a way to endure the absence of light, and the multicultural, text-saturated streets of Toronto, where reading is a way to navigate difference. In both places, reading was never just a hobby. It was a practice of survival, of empathy, of orientation. The books I loved were not always beautiful. Some were borrowed, some were secondhand, some were read in translation with awkward syntax and cheap paper. Their value was not in their appearance but in their capacity to hold me.
This is what I want to recover: a sense of reading as a lived practice, not a curated identity. A practice that is sometimes ugly, often private, and always entangled with the mess of being human. I am not asking anyone to abandon Bookstagram. I am asking us to notice what the aesthetic erases, and to make space—in our feeds and in our lives—for the books that do not photograph well, for the reading that happens in waiting rooms and on bus seats and in the middle of the night, for the stories that leave no pretty trace but change us anyway.
Toward a More Honest Reading Practice
So what do we do? I am not interested in offering a tidy list of solutions. The problem is cultural, not technical, and it will not be solved by a different filter or a new hashtag. But I can offer some questions that have guided me back to a more honest relationship with my own reading life.
First: What am I not photographing? Look at the books you leave out of the frame. The ones with torn covers, the mass-market paperbacks, the library books with their plastic jackets and barcode stickers. What would it mean to include them? To let them be seen as part of your reading life, not as its shameful secret?
Second: Who am I performing for? When I arrange a book next to a cup of coffee, who do I imagine is watching? What version of myself am I trying to project? And what would it feel like to post a book simply because I loved it, without staging, without worrying whether it fits my “brand”?
Third: What am I not reading because it doesn’t look good? This is the most uncomfortable question. Have I avoided a genre, an author, or a format because it would not photograph well? Have I chosen a book for its cover rather than its content? The aesthetic regime shapes not only what we show but what we choose.
Building a Different Kind of Shelf
In my own home, I have started keeping a “messy shelf.” It is not in the good light. It holds the books I am actually reading: the library books with their plastic covers, the paperback I dropped in the bath, the galley a friend passed on with her notes in the margins. It is not beautiful. But it is true. And I have found that when I talk about these books—the ones I read in waiting rooms, the ones I read twice in a row because the first time I was too tired to understand—people lean in. They recognize themselves. They tell me about their own messy shelves.
This is the conversation I want to have. Not about which books look best on a shelf, but about which books meet us where we are. Which books we read in secret. Which books we have never admitted to loving, because they are not the right kind of book. I want a reading culture that makes room for all of it—the high and the low, the beautiful and the battered, the literary and the lurid. Because that is what reading actually looks like. That is what a reading life looks like.
FAQ
Is Bookstagram inherently bad for reading culture?
No, Bookstagram itself is not the problem. It has introduced many people to books and created lively reading communities. The issue is the dominant aesthetic—the pressure to present reading as a visually perfect, curated activity—which can marginalize less photogenic reading practices and create anxiety about what “counts” as real reading.
How can I enjoy Bookstagram without feeling inadequate about my own reading life?
Start by noticing what you are comparing. The images you see are performances, not documentary evidence of someone’s entire reading life. Follow accounts that show a range of books, including worn copies and library books. And consider sharing your own reading honestly—the messy, the unfinished, the books you loved for reasons you cannot quite explain.
What does library science teach us about the value of “unphotogenic” books?
Library science emphasizes the book as a social object that meets readers where they are. A mass-market paperback, a large-print edition, or a well-worn library book may not be visually appealing, but it serves a vital role in a democratic reading ecosystem. These formats often reach readers who are excluded from the curated aesthetics of literary culture, and their value lies in their accessibility and use, not their appearance.
How can I build a more honest reading practice offline?
Try keeping a reading journal that is just for you, with no thought of sharing. Allow yourself to read across genres without judgment. Visit a library or a used bookstore and choose a book based on nothing but curiosity. Notice when you are choosing a book for its cover or its cultural cachet, and gently ask yourself what you actually want to read. The goal is not to reject beauty, but to make room for the full, messy range of your reading life.
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