A certain type of stubbornness develops around a person’s reading habits; it’s a quiet, uncritical stubbornness that no one calls out because, well, at least you’re reading. Readers of thrillers pile them up on their nightstands. The subgenres of romance are arranged like a filing cabinet for readers. Fantasy fans have enormous TBR lists that would take two lifetimes to complete. And something gradually, almost imperceptibly, begins to narrow in the midst of all this devotion.
Many reading lives have become so tidy and predictable that it’s difficult to ignore. Algorithms that recommend books have become frighteningly adept at verifying your preexisting preferences and encouraging you to read the same basic story in a different outfit. Publishers invest a significant amount of money to ensure that the books with the largest marketing budgets are seen by as many people as possible through influencer unboxings, email newsletters, and social media feeds. As a result, many ardent readers have unintentionally created an echo chamber out of something they thought was broadening their perspectives.
It doesn’t sound radical to read something other than your favorite genre. It hardly seems like worthwhile advice. However, those who have truly tried it—not grudgingly, not out of duty, but sincerely—tend to characterize the experience in the same way that someone might describe finally opening a window in a room they’ve been sitting in for years. Elspeth Wilson, a Scottish debut novelist, compared picking up a book that was entirely different from what she usually reads to first seeing a lion: the senses were sharpened and the brain was stimulated on a different level. It’s an odd analogy. It’s also perfectly correct.
Wilson’s tale is compelling, in part because it is so well-known. Years of academic pressure and guilt about being a slow reader had caused her to lose her relationship with reading, but during a lonely period in a new city, she rediscovered fiction. For a while, she felt that her specialty—queer romantic comedies, heartbroken poetry, and modern women’s fiction—was sufficient. However, after a few months, she became aware that she was repeatedly reading the same book with different titles. The same titles were repeated in the prize lists. The same suggestions were repeated by the accounts she followed. Her friends shared her preferences. A rut had formed in the comfort.
At first, her solution was practically an accident. Without much thought, she began grabbing whatever remained in the library at the tube station close to her home and exchanging books. Even though the book’s synopsis didn’t appeal to her, she forced herself to read the choices after joining a book club with people who had different tastes. She asked her elderly relatives for whatever they had left behind. Her shelves gradually became much more interesting and less aesthetically pleasing. She discovered that she was reading more books from decades ago, more writers of color, and more working-class authors. This wasn’t because she had set a deliberate diversity goal, but rather because the field opens up in unexpected ways when you venture outside of what publishing actively promotes.
She hardly noticed the impact on her writing. Wilson describes the combination of campus fiction, dark academia, historical subplot, magical realism, and questions of contemporary spirituality in her debut novel as challenging to market but wholly true to how her imagination had been shaped. Wilson realized that the term “genre-bending,” which was coined by a writer friend, only made sense because she had been secretly feeding herself a wildly varied literary diet for years. She had read a lot about mixing, so it felt natural. This is how it operates, and it usually goes unnoticed until someone points it out because it happens so slowly.
From a different perspective, author Bryan Ye observed the same mechanism. He discovered that his own writing had adopted the lecturing, prescriptive tone of the genre after years of reading only self-help books because that was the only style his brain had been taking in. Personal narrative began to appear in his writing as he transitioned into memoirs. His storytelling instincts began to emerge when he eventually went back to writing fiction. Without fully realizing it, he had been constructing a style from borrowed elements. Reading widely did not weaken his voice; rather, it provided him with more resources to build one.
This is understated in a way that is almost too obvious. Every genre has its own relationship to silence, time, and characters’ inner lives. James Ellroy and other mystery writers employ succinct, concise sentences that have a powerful impact. Poetry manipulates language in ways that prose is unable to. Nonfiction relies on the reader to discover drama in everyday life. When you read across these conventions, you have a lot more options when you sit down to write; it doesn’t make your writing unclear or formless. You end up thinking what other people think if you only read what other people read, as Haruki Murakami put it. It applies to both readers and writers.
Staying narrow runs the risk of more than just creative stagnation. Additionally, it’s a form of surrender to business logic. Because publishing has always placed a higher priority on what sells, recommendations, reviews, and amplifications are influenced by money just as much as merit. That’s just the way the industry works; it’s not a cynical observation. With readers actively looking for recognizable emotional beats in novel packaging, trope-based reading has emerged as a distinct subset of this. Calling it discovery seems like a stretch, but there’s nothing wrong with it.
A tiny act of defiance against all of that is reading at random, or at the very least, reading outside of your comfort zone with some sincere curiosity. It won’t solve the structural issues with publishing. It won’t address issues of unequal advancement or the difficulty of earning a living as a writer. However, it does something more subdued and perhaps more long-lasting: it maintains the reader’s control over their own creative imagination. It sets the stage for real surprise. Occasionally, it introduces you to a book or author that you would not have discovered in any other way—not because it was suggested, but rather because you happened to stumble upon something unexpected.
William Faulkner’s advice on reading was straightforward and comprehensive: read everything—classics and trash, good and bad—and absorb it in the same way that a carpenter learns a skill by observing a master. I think that sounds excessive. The majority won’t do it. However, it’s important to pay attention to the underlying intuition that breadth is important and that staying in a single library room has real repercussions. Readers and writers who have challenged their own habits typically view it as one of the better mishaps they allowed themselves to have rather than as a form of discipline.
