most annoying trait from what i see as a millenial book girlie culture is "love of books" not as love of reading but as adoration for the physical object. an e-book, a library book or an audiobook don't have the same value because you can't display them forever for others to see. full shelves of unread titles are a symbol of status. annotating your own books is a crime. using old books in art projects like collages is guaranteed to earn you "as a reader this pains me" comments. i love buying a beautiful edition as much as anyone else but man the consumption mentality here is tiresome
Book Social Media is definitely too consumerist, but this isn't a new thing or a girl thing at all. Like there's literally a bit in The Great Gatsby about how he has an impressive library, but none of the books' pages are cut.
(Books used to be bound and sold in a way where you would have to cut open the pages to read them)
i actually disagree with OP in that i think the people they're talking about aren't treating their books as objects at all - they're treating them almost exclusively as symbols that represent a whole raft of other ideas, well beyond anything contained in the actual physical pages.
i remember reading about how, in the 1950s, america was building lots of new houses for the burgeoning middle class, and these houses almost always included built-in bookshelves. books were a symbol of middle class comfort, because they were associated with disposable income and leisure time.
but the people buying these homes didn't all necessarily read, or want to read, that much! so instead they'd buy cardboard boxes with book spines glued onto them to fill the shelves. they wanted to tap into the book-as-symbol without engaging with the book-as-object.
when books are being used for their symbolic function, they can be put on a shelf like any other ornament. they're set apart from ordinary use, not bought to be read but to be part of a visual story someone is telling about themselves.
if that's how you view your books, then annotating them is akin to using an ornamental bowl to eat your cereal out of. it's not appropriate - that's not a bowl for using, it's a bowl for looking at.
but when the book is being used symbolically, the way we treat it becomes inseparable from the way we treat the ideas it symbolises. destroying a book becomes identical to attacking either the ideas expressed in that book itself, or the ideas people associate with books in general (education, learning, intellectual freedom, etc.)
this is about as far as you can get from appreciating the book as an object. it has nothing to do with enjoying the feel of the book in your hand, the texture of the pages, the smell, the weight, the physical experience of interacting with that object. it's a purely symbolic engagement, with ideas that have little to nothing to do with the object at hand. the book-as-symbol is all about the person, not the book.
for what it's worth, i dont think there's anything wrong with enjoying books as symbols. i enjoy collecting books as a distinct hobby from reading, and i enjoy displaying my collection for all sorts of symbolic reasons. if i didnt, i wouldn't have half so many of them in the house! i like to read, but i also like to be a person who has a lot of books - two very different things!
the issue is really in conflating the two, or in treating all books under all circumstances as either purely symbolic or purely practical. like most things, they're both, and which they are in any moment depends on the person engaging with them. cutting a book up for an art project might be a symbolic attack on those ideas, or it might be a practical use of an easy source of paper. a book on your shelf might be symbolic of your identity as a well-educated, literary-minded person, or it might be a nice splash of colour to liven up your living room. i don't have anything pithy to sum this up except... isnt that cool?!
