How BookTok and Korean snack wrappers have made reading radical

Well, I never. Reading books is sexy. Apparently fed up with social media, young women (and some young men) are turning back to this ancient form of communication where you actually have to think.

“She’s back – and hotter than ever,” writes Issy McElroy for Nasty magazine, a compendium of what’s called “the dusky side” of fashion and art. Accompanied by photos of a blonde model in her undies getting stuck into Lolita, the article introduces us to the hot reader: “The ones with good eyeliner, sharp minds and zero patience for bullshit. They’re not just reading – they’re reprogramming. Tired of AI regurgitations and influencer-fed ignorance, they’re reaching for pages like it’s survival. This isn’t nostalgia. It’s resistance.”

Nasty points to online book clubs such as Dua Lipa’s Service95, Kaia Gerber’s Library Science and author and influencer Sophia Tuxford, all helping to make reading books the glamorous thing to do. Sometimes such pointers lead to fluffy romances, but more often than not they highlight meaty history or science tomes, or literary fiction.

There’s a performative element: it is cool, apparently, to be reading War and Peace or Crime and Punishment or Love in the Time of Cholera on the train, so everyone can admire your beautiful brain. Or for something more contemporary, Frankie magazine suggests Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.

Pan Macmillan got in on the act with a list of “Books you’ll want to be seen reading: Classic and contemporary masterpieces that are sure to turn heads.” So if you’re in a coffee shop reading Percival Everett’s James, or Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, or Don DeLillo’s Underworld, or even Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, you will impress your fellow bookworms and elevate your reading game.

What about hot male readers? They are a rarer breed, but highly sought after in the dating stakes. Samantha Leac in Bustle magazine says it’s much better to flirt with brains than with brawn. “A poorly lit picture of your eight pack? Creepy! A shot of your tattered copy of Patti Smith’s Just Kids? Much more likely to lure me in!”

The bonkers version of this trend is happening in South Korea, where teens have been queuing up at convenience stores and pop-ups to buy buns with wrappers designed to look like book covers, with collectible bookmarks showing characters from the books as cute cartoon creatures. Of course this craze isn’t directly selling books, but titles have seen big increases in sales as curious young buyers go on to discover what’s inside the real covers. It’s all down to ingenious marketing by Minumsa, a venerable Korean publishing house: sales of Pride and Prejudice have jumped 50 per cent; Chekhov’s About Love, 223 per cent.

“In the past, books were viewed as something you should read to acquire knowledge – a tool for self-enrichment,” Jo Ah-ran, the marketing director at Minumsa, told Korea JoongAng Daily. “Recently, however, the role of books has started expanding as a channel for self-expression, where people use books to show their self-identity and lifestyle just like clothes or music.”

Young readers won’t turn back to books just because they are told it’s good for them. So why not market book reading as a way of expressing yourself, or hooking up with like-minded hot readers?

I only hope that everybody drawn back to this quaint old-fashioned piece of technology will actually do the harder work of reading the books right through, thinking about them, and talking to others about them. As Nasty says, “Reading helps you talk better. Feel more. Think clearer. It’s not deep – it’s just the truth.”

What else is happening in the book world?