Showing how what we read, and with whom, reveals how power works in America

In an interview about his novel The Emperor of Gladness being selected for Oprah’s Book Club, Ocean Vuong recalled the women in his mother’s nail salon—working-class immigrants, mostly single mothers—who would buy whatever book Oprah had chosen. What she gave them, Vuong reflected, was “access… a ticket into the discourse.” Books, he said, “can change the posture of somebody’s mother.” It’s a small observation, but it points to something Tamara Bhalla takes seriously in The Social Life of Reading: that how we read, what we read, and with whom we read is rarely just a matter of personal taste.

Bhalla reveals how social reading practices, from celebrity book selections to Goodreads reviews, are crucial arenas where power circulates, gets contested, and gets remade in contemporary American culture. Drawing on sociology of literature, ethnic studies, and feminist cultural analysis, she shows that reading, often framed as apolitical and personal, is fundamentally a political practice. Using the term “post-digital” to capture how 21st-century reading blends digital platforms with in-person gatherings and print, Bhalla traces two distinct reading cultures: mainstream communities, including celebrity book clubs, Goodreads, and Moms for Liberty, that center white, heteronormative values through affective, particularly maternal, responses to literature; and reading communities informed by digital Black feminism and traditions of self-definition, conscious consumption, and political engagement to imagine alternative literary futures.

The result is a striking portrait of contemporary reading culture as simultaneously structured by whiteness and shaped by the emergence of racially conscious alternatives. Bhalla demonstrates that what we read, with whom we read, and what we value in literature is not a matter of individual taste—it is a powerful cultural force shaping who gets represented, whose voices matter, and what stories get told.

TAMARA BHALLA is associate professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. She is the author of Reading Together, Reading Apart: Identity, Belonging, and South Asian American Community. Her scholarship has appeared in Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History; MELUS; and Journal of Asian American Studies.