The Book Community Has an Entitlement Problem

In 2022, a friend told me she didn't want to read nonfiction because she didn't want to learn anything. I laughed. She laughed. We changed topics. As we discussed books in future conversations, I kept recommending her books, and she kept sending them back feeling ‘meh’. Too much. Too slow. Too many words she'd have to think about. Too many feelings. Then, the books she recommended were… nothing. Flat. Uninspired. No twists. No emotion. A book that refuses to make you think rarely makes you feel, and a book that refuses to make you feel rarely makes you think. The written word is funny like that.

I noticed this with one friend. Then another. One’s a nothing. Two might be a coincidence. Three is a pattern. Now I'm watching it happen to an entire community.

Literary Devices are now elitist?

Somewhere in a comment section of Bookstagram (Instagram online book community for those not chronically online), an author felt the need to comment that a room cannot erupt, go silent, or stop breathing, because a room is not alive. It's the people in it who do those things. However, the influencer who was ranting (and rightfully so) shared that this author, and many readers, are missing literary devices. Synecdoche: a literary device that's been in use since before English was standardized, and the book influencer had to explain basic literary devices like a teacher.

Please read this again: an influencer in the book community is correcting an author on literary devices. An influencer is having to act as a teacher.

This isn't an isolated post, either. Readers are calling out authors, publicly, for using words they'd have to look up. For writing sentences that don't resolve things exactly the way the reader expected. For expecting the reader to sit with a smidge of discomfort and do some work a book has always asked of its reader. Another new phenomenon is the misunderstanding of a protagonist. A protagonist does not equal a hero. A protagonist is not always a good character who will do the right thing. A Protagonist is the main character. It might even be an idea, a culture, or a concept. The Antagonist is the character working against the protagonist. And fun fact, the antagonist may not be a character. It may be a concept, an ideal, a government, etc.

Look at me… teaching.

Don’t even get me started on trigger warnings.

It’s not the author's job to make you comfortable

The majority of readers have a phone in their pocket with a dictionary built into it. Half of them are reading on a Kindle that will define a word for you the second you tap it. And even with that, people are choosing to ignore those tools because of the discomfort that comes with learning. There are books, like cozy (insert any genre like fantasy, mystery, whatever) which are written to be gentle, but gentle does not mean bland. Gentle does not mean there are no character arcs, no plot twists, no emotions. Think of Legends & Lattes - perhaps the defining book in cozy fantasy: it has character growth and development, a plot twist, but none of it taxes you. It’s still a beautiful book with themes, and literary devices without asking you to feel heavy feelings. Please know this difference.

I’m not talking about accessibility, either. Accessibility is making something available to all, which is real and has an important place, but in a different conversation. When a reader needs large print, or audio, or simplified syntax for reasons beyond laziness and entitlement, those accommodations should be met. I am seeing something different. Now, readers with every tool available refuse to use a single one of them, then blaming the author for the gap.

Trigger warnings - here I go anyway. The need to put trigger warnings or content warnings is getting out of hand. Bad things happen in life and bad things happen in books and to characters. You need to read it without knowing about the “trigger” going into the book. Do you think my fifteen year old self liked reading Heart of Darkness where humans are hunted/poached like animals? No, I did not. Did it make me think? Feel? Form opinions? Yes. Does my almost-forty-year-old-self want to read books where characters are sexually assaulted or there’s brutal and grisly murder? No, I don’t. Does it build empathy? Help me draw parallels to real-life and present-day situations? Yes. That means discomfort is important.

Making a reader think and learn is not a failure of the craft. A well-placed literary device, a sentence that doesn't explain everything and hand you the meaning on a platter, plot twists, character arcs: these are what separates a book from a shopping list. Asking an author to strip all of that out so nobody ever has to reach for a dictionary isn't a request for approachability or accessibility. It's a request for the art form to stop being an art form.

Publishers are watching

The comment section may seem innocuous enough, but there’s a broader ripple effect. Publishers watch social media. They watch engagement, watch what gets shared and what gets dragged, and they draw conclusions from it. If the loudest voices say "big words bad, easy words good," publishers will start acquiring and promoting books that fit that mold. Not because it's better writing. Because it performs.

This is how you get a slow, deliberate flattening of what gets published. Not banned books. Not censored books. Just fewer books that ask anything of you, because the ones that do keep getting torn apart online while the simple ones get celebrated for being "accessible." Every generation before this one was handed harder books than the one before it and figured out how to meet them. Every generation (until now) has gotten smarter than the one preceding it. I'm watching a community actively choosing the opposite: books that ask less, readers who expect less, and an industry constantly rewarding both.

Instagram v Reality

I don't think most readers feel this way. I think the loud ones are VERY loud, and the actual readers, the ones who want a book to make them feel, to grow, to remind them they are human, are mostly lurking or not online in these spaces at all. But loud wins on the internet, and loud is what publishers are watching. A book that doesn't ask you to feel or think isn't a gift; it's an insult to readers and a judgement that readers aren’t capable of learning more or thinking critically. I'd rather be handed something that makes me reach for a dictionary than a book that lumps me in with a lowest common denominator.