all your lit bros are dead

confessions and excuses

I am not broadly, on the internet. I’m not on Facebook or Instagram or TikTok. I used to be on Twitter a lot, but hardly ever anymore. Not that not-being-online is a personality trait, I’m just happier without that shit in my life.

People keep telling me that I need to be on Instagram and TikTok and occasionally, I think yeah, they’re probably right. And these kinds of conversations always seem to arise around what’s called #Bookstagram or #BookTok. These are places on the internet where people talk about books; and they’re enormously large places — a search for #Bookstagram brings up more than 96 million posts.

But when I see the discourse around these places, I’m so-so-so happy that I’ve stayed away. That discourse, of course, popped back up into the news this week in a Rolling Stone piece titled “Bros Are Coming for BookTok. These TikTokers Aren’t Having It.” The piece takes issue with the type of person that’s come to be defined as the LitBro.

It’s hard to define the LitBro or “bro-lit” — the LitBros reading diet of choice — but here’s a close definition from the Rolling Stone article, “As the name implies, bro-lit is literature championed by bros, but it’s also meant to describe books popular with men who only consume specific classic literature and think they should be praised for it.”

There are a couple books given in the article as standards of the bro-lit canon. And I’ve seen these mentioned before in similar pieces. So I’d like to do a few little capsule reviews here because I think the suffix bro in LitBro (or the prefix in Bro-Lit) is overused and cliched.

Infinite Jest — This is the novel you’ll see most frequently tied to the LitBros. And, I guess it’s a decent novel. It doesn’t make my best books list because it’s mostly just several hundred pages of David Foster Wallace (who was, kind of, a wimp) trying to prove how smart he is. And DFW sucked. He was a shitty human being and his writing doesn’t redeem that. All I could think as I read that book was this guy threw a coffee table at his girlfriend.

Catcher in the Rye — This is a beautiful book. And it’s a great book to read during the autumn. But Holden Caulfield sucks. He just sucks. You’re not supposed to read this book and say oh he’s making so many good points.

The Brothers Karamazov — okay, it’s a great book. But again, the only character you should admire is Alexei and occasionally Dmitri. And you have to recognize Dostoyevski’s tropes when you see them (i.e. the pure-hearted prostitute and lecherous old man). This book is not real life.

Anything by Jonathan Franzen - nobody reads this guy anymore. Not even the lit bros.

Anything by Karl Ove Knausgaard — he’s good. he’s very good. But he’s not Jesus Christ incarnated. And occasionally, he’s a total douchebag. Like that time he gets all sensitive because he has to take his kid to a gym class and does absolutely no self-reflection over it.

I could go on and on with this list. Most of the LitBros have died off or moved to reading head-inflating shit like Nietzsche and Heidegger. They could use some Kierkegaard in their lives, but whatever.

But the main lesson I take from their appearance in the discourse is that you should never believe you deserve to be praised for what you read (or for what music you listen to). I used to feel that way sometimes too but I made a habit of pulling myself back and saying you sound like an asshole right now. When you talk to people who read Taylor Jenkins Reid or Emily Henry, you don’t need to tell them oh, you should read The Sun Also Rises. Because again, that makes you sound like the asshole in the room. And it’s not true. You don’t need to read Hemingway any more than I need to read Colleen Hoover.

I think the real problem with LitBros is that they’re tied (or at least there’s the perception that they’re tied) to a certain reading of literature. And it’s a valid critique. The standard interpretive mode for literature and literary criticism over the past several hundred years has been through the eyes of the straight white man. And yeah, that’s fucked up. If you take issue with that, good. Thankfully, literary criticism is no longer restrained to that reading. Elif Batuman and Merve Emre are both brilliant. But so is James Wood. We need variety.

I just put this together in like half an hour and I’ll end it here with a list of books you should read by me (a bro) that LitBros — as defined by the discourse — probably hate.

White Teeth — Zadie Smith

Breakfast at Tiffany’s — Truman Capote

Less — Andrew Sean Greer

Wuthering Heights — Emily Bronte (you are not supposed to like Heathcliff!)

Mrs. Dalloway — Virginia Woolf

Goodbye to Berlin — Christopher Isherwood

Hotel Pastis — Peter Mayle