Good afterevenmorn, Readers!

I am back again with more internet drama that I believe is all interconnected and all very much related to the current literacy crisis we are suffering. This time, it’s all about skimming. Specially, the revelation that all these social media “readers” are actually just skipping to the dialogue and reading only that. Let’s dive into this little nugget, shall we?

Not to overuse this gif, but this is the exact face I made when I first heard about this practice.

My darlings, what do you mean you only read the dialogue?! How can anyone possibly consider a book read if the only thing that was read was the dialogue?! This is insane!

Honestly, I feel like I’m losing my mind a little bit. Though, it does go a long way into explaining why some books that I considered to be poorly written became so popular, I guess, if all they were being judged on was the dialogue. Good grief.

Alright, if you thought me harsh in the last article, this one might get savage. Well, as savage as I’m able to be while I am also incredibly sad, because both as a reader and a writer, this revelation has utterly depressed me.

“I read —”

No. No you did not. You didn’t read those books. You might have skimmed them. But you certainly didn’t read them.  I’d wager you have a very shallow understanding of those books, if you didn’t read the dialogue and hallucinate an entirely different story to fit.

The main culprit for this practice appears to be a desire to be seen as a prolific reader, instead of being just a reader. It’s the bizarre need to claim to have read an absurd number of books; for clout, I guess. But if they’re alright with being liars, there’s not much to do about it, I suppose.

Here’s the thing, folks who do this, you are robbing yourself. Absolute, pitiful thievery. You have stolen from yourself the weird, wonderful, breathless tumble into new worlds; the taste of the air, the colours of the forest in the twilight, the smell of salted boar roasting on a spit, the woodsmoke in the cool air…

You have taken away the sound of war horns, the tumult of battle, the zip of bullets as you crawl with your hero through the muck, and grief, and terror.

This world that was conceived and lovingly brought to life upon the page by a writer whose work you have decided to disregard for a number that isn’t real. After all, you didn’t read those books. That number claimed is a lie.

More, you’re robbing yourselves of the beauty of the written word; how satisfying it is to have words flow like music, how they can be manipulated to dance or to shudder, to sing or to stutter as the story demands.

I make no secret of the fact that Steven Erikson is among my favourite authors. A large part of that is how wonderfully he constructs his prose. Sometimes more than the incredible stories he tells, the prose is what lands hardest. I am continually impressed as a reader (and not a little bit jealous as a writer).

And yet more, you’re stealing away important context, nuance, and character moments from your experience of the story. All of which happens without a single syllable uttered by the characters.

Sometimes, characters don’t speak for an entire chapter. What do you do then?

I am struggling to understand why this is even a thing. Surely if one enjoys reading the way these people claim to, they’d want everything. Not just the dialogue. Apparently not.

It might be easy to blame social media for this nonsense. But the social media itself isn’t the problem. There are plenty of actual readers who do love reading, who have been staring at the number of books proclaimed as read with as much confusion as I did before I heard about this thing (honestly, how on earth could anyone read more than two hundred books in a month. How? HOW?! Oh… by not actually reading them. Gotchya).

They’re not the problem, and they’ve found and built wonderful communities that would not have been possible without social media. Social media can truly be a wonderful place of support, community, and connection.

It’s the people on there lying to their viewers, proclaiming to have read a book when they, in fact, have just skimmed it that are the issue. People are at the core of this problem.

Sure, they might be feeling a pressure to be seen as prolific readers facilitated by social media, but I have a feeling that is largely self-imposed. This chasing clout in the reading sphere is entirely their own manufacture. No reader I know cares so much about how many books were read. They care about what was read, and what you actually thought about it.

I don’t think that folks will stop being silly about reading. The desire to elevate oneself, even on the flimsiest of pretences, will always affect every sphere, never mind the bookish corners of the world. Appeals to stop misleading their viewers will likely mean nothing to folks who have been comfortable doing exactly that to date. So all I will ask is that they stop robbing themselves of all the wonderful things that reading beyond the dialogue will give them. There are entire worlds out there, my loves.

My darlings, you are missing out on so, so much.

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When S.M. Carrière isn’t brutally killing your favorite characters, she spends her time teaching martial arts, live streaming video games, and sometimes painting. In other words, she spends her time teaching others to kill, streaming her digital kills… and sometimes relaxing. Her most recent titles include Skylark,  Human and The Timbercreek Incident.