Abstract
Years ago, as an office worker considering graduate school, I asked a former professor for advice. I said I missed sitting around wooden tables talking with other people about books. “Well, you don’t have to do a PhD—you could start a book club,” he said incredulously. I remembered this moment as I read María Angélica Thumala Olave’s The Love of Books: Attachment to a Changing Cultural Object. Thumala Olave quickly establishes herself as a kindred spirit to those of us who are deeply attached to books and literary sociality, and demonstrates how readers form affective bonds to books as material and symbolic objects.
Thumala Olave positions the “cultural sociology of reading” on offer in The Love of Books as following neither the “social practice” approach (Griswold et al., 2005) nor the Bourdieusian path of mapping literary taste onto social structure (Bourdieu, 1984; Sapiro, 2023). She argues that both approaches are ultimately insufficient for understanding love and attachment. The agonism of taste as a project of class distinction is at odds with the other ways people experience their relationships to reading; rather than competitive, people describe experiences that are pleasurable, even mystical or sacred. This is harder to see from conventional perspectives within sociology. As a critical discipline, it seeks to strip away decoration—to use a book metaphor, the embossed covers and marbled pages—to see all that is structural, and hardly shimmering, underneath. But to relentlessly attempt to deconstruct the magic is to miss other kinds of sociological data.
In the first chapter, “In the presence of books and books’ iconic power,” Thumala Olave theorizes books as sacralized objects, using the sacred to represent most valued goods in post-secular societies. The material codex comes to contain people’s lives, changes, and relationships. The sacral theme continues in the following chapter, in which the author turns to Roy Rappaport’s theory of ritual to “explain how reading rituals facilitate the emergence of desired, pleasurable states (p. 68).
Thumala Olave’s research is built on extensive qualitative data from two empirical sources: interviews with adult readers (n = 76) in the UK and Caribbean as well as written responses by volunteers (n = 293) to questions for the UK’s Mass Observation project. This wealth of data is particularly illuminating in the book’s descriptions of pleasure and gratitude for the outcomes that reading engenders. In her interviewees’ stories, reading can offer a way to escape childhood homes of deprivation and hardship; a path to politics and causes; models of the good life; and a chance at deepened reflexivity.
Technological change and its profound social impact is the specter haunting literary publics in 2026. The love of books’ engagement with technology is mostly limited to an exploration of how people’s connection to e-books differs from attachment to the material codex. While respondents enjoy the increased access and portability of e-books, certain spatiotemporal aspects, such as being able to know how thick a book is at first glance, are irreplaceable. Walter Benjamin used the term “aura” to describe the reverence works of art that are unique can elicit in their viewers. Contrary to expectations that e-books might lack aura altogether, Thumala Olave shows that readers assign some of the aura of the iconic codex to e-books—ultimately linking the aesthetic experience to the print book’s materiality. Some of this is encouraged by technical references. What happens when people do more, or all, of their reading within technologies that do not refer back to the material book? Can a novel serialized through Substack have aura?
In the book’s fifth chapter, the author zooms into the experiences of four readers to provide a deep and impressionistic portrayal of what it is like to love books. These readers share experiences of deep recognition and validation, escape from pain, and understanding and empathy. In a return to the consistent theme of the sacred that animates this book, one reader, Frances, in the final chapter, calls a group of novels that are central to her judgments of the good life and important decisions her “little shrine” (p. 170).
Much of The Love of Books rejects an agonistic frame in favor of embracing a sociological analysis better suited for interpreting pleasure and joy. It is, in some ways, a needed course-correction. It also produces its own gaps, particularly about the role of power and economic structure. The book could have further traversed questions of race, gender, and perceptions of readers. These themes came up in Thumala Olave’s interviews: a Black woman reader said that she felt it was important to participate in the study because of a lack of representation. Some women described their reading with guilt (memorably, one retiree who said she still felt it was self-indulgent to read in the morning). Race and gender are also important to how people make meaning about their reading, but there was less engagement with theoretical frames for understanding these relationships (e.g. from the sociology of race, sex, and gender and/or feminist and queer theory) than to iconicity, sacrality, and ritual. Thumala Olave creates a binary of love versus competition in her rejection of field theory. Might there be options beyond either a joyless reduction of books to status or full-throated enshrinement of reading at the altar? Interesting examples of exploring attachment alongside power come from scholarly explorations of sexuality, psychoanalysis, and literature as well as works of fiction and memoir. We desire messily, imbricated as we are in structures of power. Analyzing this does not mean affording less value to love or art.
I will take from The Love of Books the valuable lesson—both as salve to my younger self and as an important reminder to the scholar I am today—that joy, pleasure, and attachment are worth following. For any social scientists interested in literature, attachment, and media, this book comes highly recommended.
