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IF YOU EVER HEAR an adult making small talk with a child, I’d wager the conversation revolves around favourites. What’s your favourite colour? What’s your favourite flower? Who’s your favourite Pokémon? When toddlers are acquiring language, we speak to them in our lowest unit of thought: favourites—i.e., ranking, scarcity. The market is the prime organizing force of our lives under capitalism, and its relational logic of good, better, best is our default. Cash rules everything around me.

We apply this language to a multiplicity of things it cannot adequately describe. For example, friendship: you are near guaranteed that when someone says “bestie,” they mean one of several close pals, rather than a single indomitable friend.

And we use it to describe art. Best Albums of the Decade. Our Greatest Living Authors. The only movie you need to see this year. Easily the best novel I’ve read in a long while. My Top 5. This application is rampant, from high to low culture, from academia to Goodreads, from venture capitalists to your neighbourhood communist. Unfortunately, it’s a parlance that requires us to malign everything else to praise one work. But when it comes to capturing both friends and art, ranked favourites don’t make much sense.

By design, a work of art—let’s focus on books—is unique, incomparable. That’s why we get upset when we hear AI companies are data-scraping memoirs or building replication machines. But we resort to describing literature by how it stacks up to totally unrelated texts, because rating stuff is burned into our brains by the competitive economy.

The consequence? We’re saying the merit of a book is relative to other books, not internal, eternal, but external. We are voiding the work’s intrinsic worth. We are helping convert it into a floating commodity like Bitcoin or Air Canada stocks.

Bring Back the Gatekeeper, Please

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How “Cozy Lit” Became the Latest and Most Shameless Form of Digital Escapism

Grading novels the way we do meat thermometers or winter tires erases the incongruence, wildness, and uncountability that define an artwork. “Commensuration,” a term coined by Wendy Nelson Espeland and Mitchell L. Stevens, is the translation of the worth of any pursuit into a number. Yet not everything can be scored as a one-to-five. Espeland and Stevens describe a beleaguered economist tasked with a cost–benefit analysis of a proposed dam. One hiccup is that the dam would eliminate the locals’ ability to go tubing: to drift down the river on a floatie on a summer’s day. But “efforts to derive a robust price for tubing failed.” And so, “as is common with characteristics that are hard to measure, the value of tubing was excluded from the analysis.”

It is embarrassingly transactional to commensurate art and our engagement. We’ve become self-serious buffoons, rebranding the happy bookworm as an important arbiter of taste, labouring over the significant goal to consume thirty books this year. As if there’s something lacking in only reading for pleasure! Is a book a keeper of equity, not something to be enjoyed for itself? (I remain haunted by a chart printed in a how-to guide to art collecting, ordering painters and sculptors from highest to lowest follower count.)

Here’s an outrageous historical fact that burbles to the internet’s surface every few moons: in the 1950s, the US Central Intelligence Agency provided funding to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Eric Bennett reports the CIA wanted to encourage literature with a depoliticized focus on the individual, muting socio-economic context or critique. Iowa was one of the original creative writing programs, a blueprint for hundreds that followed. Your conspiracy theorist uncle was right! Yet there are less convoluted, more pernicious ways that a domineering, blinkered, money-minded world view infiltrates our cultural sectors, turning our love of reading into productivity dots and us into foot soldiers for an extractive impulse we probably hate. We don’t have to live this way.

Next time you talk up a book, experiment with constraining yourself to solely what’s between the covers. Don’t reach for a comparator. You are not a BookExpo catalogue. If you work at a bookstore, don’t curate a Staff Picks list. Write a sticky note for the titles you admire, enthusiastically explaining what’s inside. Because actually, I don’t care which five you liked best, Nathan. Can you just tell me about the books?

Thea Lim

Thea...