Thoughts on these two opposing articles?
I saw Book Riot's objection response first to alert me to the original article.
Back-Talking The Tone Police: Book People Are Not Your Enemy . The writer objects to what she/he sees as a condescending tone toward "book people".
I went to read the original article,
We Have to Save Books from the Book People, and the main theme of it is initially defending the integrity of the all-mighty classic from those readers who embrace social media to the point where they are, as the article states later, "flattening genres", whatever that means.
I agree with a few points in the main article to an extent, but it takes an unusual turn later and seems to turn into an almost rant against "book people", who I'm supposing from the article's intent to say aren't the real, serious readers?
The paragraph rant further down the article starts with this -
"A reader is someone who is in the habit of reading. A Book Person has turned reading into an identity. A Book Person participates in book culture. Book People refer to themselves as “bookworms” and post Bookstagrams of their “stacks.” They tend towards language like “I love this so hard” or “this gave me all the feels” and enjoy gentle memes about buying more books than they can read and the travesty of dog-eared pages. They build Christmas trees out of books. They write reviews on Goodreads and read book blogs and use the hashtag #amreading when they are reading. They have TBR (to be read) lists and admit to DNFing (did not finish). They watch BookTube and BookTok. They love a stuffed shelf but don’t reject audiobooks and e-readers; to a Book Person, reading is reading is reading."
Definition aside of "book people", the paragraph alone is not necessarily damning, but it continues to where it's more of a mocking tone.
Can a "real reader" versus a "book people" not do the same thing in regard to:
"Book People often feel they’re being demeaned or mocked for liking genre fiction or listening to audiobooks. They also tend to buy into the idea that books are a kind of empathy machine—that reading good books can make you a better person—which makes books that explore ambiguous morality nothing short of dangerous. "