On Reading Whatever The Hell We Want

You heard me.

The first time I wanted to read a book with a half-naked man on the cover, I was twelve. At that point, I had already read a fair share of novels I probably shouldn’t have, speared onward by my middle school librarian and a need to satisfy an above-average reading level. I didn’t understand that the content of my beloved stories was beyond my age range in certain events rather than vocabulary. I was a sixth-grader in Texas. No one cared what I was reading if I didn’t mention it. That’s not so much the case now with the recent prevalence of unjustified book-banning in the state, but I digress.

The half-naked man was Jace Herondale. He was blond and ripped and covered in sick, symbolic tattoos. The cover cut off his face. You could only see his lips subtly pressed together and the curling tendrils of blonde hair brushing broad shoulders and a smooth, strong chest. He was the shining background of the New York skyline. The book was stocked in the fantasy section of my middle school library. I bent down to pick it up, intrigued by the title, City of Bones, and began skimming the synopsis.

Jace wasn’t a mafia leader or a drug dealer or some rich inked-out guy trying to seduce a female coworker. He was a Shadowhunter- a highly trained teenage warrior working to protect humans, known as mundanes, from demons only his kind can see. It sounded like a killer urban fantasy to me, complete with magic powers and a female protagonist saving the day. I stood, tucking the hulking book beneath my arm, and turned to leave.

“You really shouldn’t read that,” I heard behind me. The voice was soft but harsh. I could feel the judgment in her stare before pivoting to meet her gaze. I don’t remember her name now, but I recall with stunning clarity her tone, like chiseled ice. “My mom says it’s awful. It has nasty stuff in it. Smart girls don’t read things like that.”

I was shocked. My choice in reading material had never been questioned before, yet here I was, feeling the wrath of a classmate’s mother, blushing tomato and frozen in place. I stayed like that for a moment, not sure how to respond. Eventually, she must have deemed me old news. She dropped her eyes, stood from her crouched position, and left the library with a thick book in her own grasp.

It was Twilight.

I recall that day often now. It feels like a stand-out moment, a first encounter with what would become a future recurrence. I read the book anyway, of course. Tackled the entire seven-book Mortal Instruments series over the following year. The most any character did was kiss until book five, when an anticlimactic fade-to-black scene was the culmination of impropriety. That shouldn’t matter anyway. The cover shouldn’t have either. I enjoyed the world-building, the character-driven relationships, and the unique magic system that overlapped with our mundane world, and that was enough to make it meaningful to me.

I’ve since come to learn that blends of fiction, fantasy, and romance, are viewed as lesser. Less academic, less important, less well-written, less respected. This disdain, the judging stares from men on planes or librarians in hallways or parents from afar, is unnecessary. What makes a book like City of Bones unworthy of loving readership?

Because books aimed at women are considered junk. Junk food, trashy, poorly written, whatever convenient adjective suits the critic. The term “trashy” was coined to describe romance novels specifically. A book in that category would be criticized for underdeveloped writing, over-reliance on sex as a plot point, and a heavy focus on unrealistic female expectations. But these comments are often unfounded in the world of romance today, with authors veering from the stereotypical bodice ripper to create rounded, well-written works of fiction and romance with Colleen Hoover’s many novels serving as fitting examples of this success.

The fact is, women read more fiction than men. In fact, women read more than men in every category of literary consumption, from physical texts to audiobooks. In 2013, 82% of women had read at least one book compared to 69% of men. While this gap has closed slightly over the years, women still drive the book industry. Romance and erotica is the highest selling genre, worth a whopping $1.44 billion. And why is the genre, featuring and written by women, so popular?

It depicts female happiness. The protagonist is special, sometimes gifted with magic in fantastical cases, and spearheads the story to her own will. She is independent, smart, and has actual personality traits. Take January Andrews from the popular novel Beach Read by Emily Henry. The protagonist is a struggling romance novelist, working through the loss of her father and an impending deadline when writer’s block is all she knows. January has to find herself, sell a novel, and tackle complex emotions, with her college writing rival Augustus Everett living next door. January is accomplished and brave and witty and only turns to Augustus when both characters have developed healthy relationships with themselves and each other. These novels have characters who treat women with respect. The protagonist has ambitions and chooses to have a romantic addition to her life, but does not need it. Reading these books is a woman’s reclamation of relationships. It’s the ability to imagine tangible joy, the agency to redefine love and demand more from partners. It’s the right to feel understood while reading. It’s connection and validation.

A book can have sex and romance (or magic, too) and still speak on other topics. Authors discuss family relationships, politics, mental health, abuse, and more, but these subjects are ignored as secondary additions when it’s a woman’s work under scrutiny. To quote Professor Mary Beard, the Classics editor of the Times Literary Supplement, “Women don’t do ‘weighty’ things. These are words that are not so glaringly correlated with gender, but they’re a code for gender”. Love should not take away from the weight of other plotlines, and it doesn’t. As in life, love exists simultaneously alongside challenges and loss. Women exist alongside men. They deserve to be written about and seen.

We deserve to write and read what we want.

I felt those feelings before knowing the statistics. I read books by Sarah J. Maas, Veronica Roth, Emily Henry, and Ali Hazelwood. I spanned across genres, but I never abandoned the creators. In reading books by women, with strong female leads, with lessons of fiction applicable to my reality, I grew into who I am today. I refuse to feel shame for scandalous or revealing covers. I refuse to feel forced into the secrecy of content. While every work of words can be subject to critique, they are not supposed to lay armorless to insults spewed by those who are classically judging by the cover.

The cover of City of Bones and the rest of The Mortal Instruments series has since been remade. In 2015, the cut-off characters backing the setting’s skyline were replaced with fully clothed, head-to-toe characters frozen in an action shot with their chosen battle weapon. They’re eye-catching and informative, but they exemplify the discretion we’ve adopted to fit a more acceptable image of readership. I don’t know a single book nerd who hasn’t tried and enjoyed Cassandra Clare’s books. But I met them all later in life through social media where secret enjoyments became public conversations.

As BookTok, Bookstagram, and BookTube (subsets of social platforms TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube) became popular outlets for common expression, readers like myself have begun breaking down this stigma and many others through connection and enjoyment. Effects of the discussions on these platforms are felt in the publishing industry with recent articles even attributing the skyrocketed book sales of 2021 to readers on the apps. We’re able to use the power of shared passion for good, normalizing romance writing, promoting books by women and women of color, reviewing diverse additions to the genre, and encouraging male readership of these books so they can debunk internal biases themselves.

If you want to read a book, read it. Enjoy it. Carry the hardcover monstrosity around. Its content is not diminished by the addition of sex or female power or romance or vampires or a scandalous cover. It’s not diminished by what others may think. It’s not lesser because it didn’t win awards or receive raving reviews from famous male names. When it comes to reading, there’s no such thing as a guilty pleasure (though I practice this throughout my life, too). It’s all just pleasure.