{"id":59726,"date":"2026-04-21T01:00:53","date_gmt":"2026-04-21T05:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=59726"},"modified":"2026-04-20T10:25:05","modified_gmt":"2026-04-20T14:25:05","slug":"qotd-bibliophiles-are-massive-losers-why-cant-we-just-admit-that","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2026\/04\/21\/qotd-bibliophiles-are-massive-losers-why-cant-we-just-admit-that\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: “Bibliophiles are massive losers, why can’t we just admit that?”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>It’s a conspiracy. Every piece of worthless advice I ever hear tells me I must, “Read, read, read”. I can’t even try to listen to music on YouTube without entrepreneurs, life coaches and other snake oil salesmen popping up on shouty adverts, posing alongside other people’s Lamborghinis and Learjets, asking me to guess how many books the world’s top fifty “Super Achievers” read each year. (It’s fifty-two, conveniently.) “The more you learn, the more you earn!” these morons confidently claim. As if reading books makes you a billionaire.<\/p>\n

I don’t buy it. I bet billionaires don’t read at all. Not only because they don’t have the time, but because every big reader I know is broke. Without exception, books have overloaded their minds, and their lives are in total disarray. When they’re not consumed by tortuous examinations of Socialist Realism in the shallower subsections of the Baltic Canal between late October 1933 and early March 1934, they’re deconstructing turgid translations of 9th Century Glagolitic poetry from the White Carpathian territories of Great Moravia. On weekends, for light relief, they dip into obscure anthologies of critically-acclaimed feminist speculative fiction championing unsung writers born in the shadow of the Chappal Waddi in the Mambilla Plateau. What should have been their office hours are spent haggling with elderly volunteers in Oxfam bookshops over worthless, dogeared volumes of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s early letters or needlessly exhaustive histories of the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 in the Ganges-Brahmaputra basin. They own vast stacks of surplus, dust-magnet books, but they never own art, or cars, or houses. Bibliophiles are massive losers \u2014 why can’t we just admit that? There’s a clear correlation between reading and underachievement. There’s a reason homeless vagabonds line their coat pockets with paperbacks and newspapers. Our children must be warned, before it happens to them.<\/p>\n

Reading is even less helpful to writers. If you write, you are incurably influenced by whatever garbage you happen to be reading at the time. For example, if I’m reading Hemingway, I finish this sentence here. Whereas, in the rare, transcending moments that I am reading, say, Henry James, I find, to my eternal chagrin, that I write \u2014 if, indeed, “write” is the morpheme, or mot juste<\/em>, for which I rightly delve \u2014 in my lasting endeavours \u2014 my contention, if you will, against the ordained \u2014 in a spirit of refined demonstration, or braggadocio, as the case may be, that … Where was I?<\/p>\n

Then, of course, there’s the snobbery associated with reading. “Read a book!” command the enlightened few, should you dare disagree with them on any trendy subject. It\u2019s ridiculous, but if you read \u2014 or, better still, opine pretentiously about what<\/em> you read \u2014 the chattering classes will clamber to pressgang you into their fanatical ranks. Nobody cares if you write anything, so long as you describe the latest high-status books as “vital”, “necessary”, “required”, or “essential”. Trust me, you can get away for years with pretending that you are “working on something big that I’d rather not talk about for fear of jinxing it” while freely enjoying all the wine and canapes you can stomach. But suggest you don’t read, and people quickly get suspicious.<\/p>\n

Dominic Hilton, “All Booked Up”, The Critic<\/em><\/a>, 2020-08-17.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s a conspiracy. Every piece of worthless advice I ever hear tells me I must, “Read, read, read”. I can’t even try to listen to music on YouTube without entrepreneurs, life coaches and other snake oil salesmen popping up on shouty adverts, posing alongside other people’s Lamborghinis and Learjets, asking me to guess how many […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[32,57,41],"tags":[59,86,907,134],"class_list":["post-59726","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-humour","category-quotations","tag-addiction","tag-criticism","tag-snobbery","tag-writing"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-fxk","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59726","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59726"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59726\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":102005,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59726\/revisions\/102005"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59726"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59726"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59726"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}