In an age of AI-generated text, the physical book reasserts itself. Unlike text produced by LLMs, a book has weight and permanence. To hold one is to be grounded in a material record of human consciousness and a significance that predates literacy.Vincenzo Livieri/Reuters
Caia Hagel is the author of ANON: The Future of Love and Friendship in the Age of AI.
Celebrity culture has long been worshipped as the glamorous, glittering opposite of intellectual life. Yet a scroll through singer-songwriter Dua Lipa’s Instagram reveals that a different kind of cultural currency is emerging. Between dazzling concert footage and high-fashion editorial shoots are snapshots of physical books, often accompanied by long, thoughtful captions. Through her influential Service95 Book Club, Lipa’s superstardom has been turning reading into a soulful ambition that, coupled with Miu Miu socks worn with heels, approaches a spiritual practice. She brought this great appetite for books – and the promise of intimacy that reading offers – to life in its most romantic form at her recent wedding to actor Callum Turner.
In a tribute to their viral literary meet-cute, sparked when they realized they were reading the exact same chapter of Hernán Díaz’s novel Trust, the couple eschewed traditional excess for a sprawling, custom book-themed celebration. “We are on the same page,” Mr. Turner is said to have joked – a line that has since become part of the couple’s mythology. True love is no longer a big diamond, they seemed to be saying; it’s a shared library. When images of their celebration swept across the world, they crystallized the currency of a new visual economy.
Whether consciously or unconsciously, we have all absorbed these images through screen osmosis: Kendall Jenner lounging in a micro bikini with Fariha Róisín’s How to Cure a Ghost, neon Post-it notes peeping from the pages; Kaia Gerber beachside, using a copy of Virginie Despentes’s Dear Dickhead as a shield against paparazzi; and again, Dua Lipa, on a yacht in Ibiza, Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life resting face-down beside a half-drunk glass of wine. These are not book ads. Nor are they just casual reading posts. They are markers of a very specific capital.
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The humble printed book is in the grips of a passionate renaissance as both the symbol, and the artifact, of that capital. Clutched in manicured hands, dog-eared and showily spilling out of designer handbags, a book is no longer merely something we read, it’s an object of aspiration. Fashion houses, beauty brands, perfume campaigns and dating apps increasingly borrow from literature for cultural authority, while a well-chosen book now signals taste, emotional intelligence and desirability. I’ve called this phenomenon “Lit Chic” to define the specific way books have been transforming into aesthetic accessories, status symbols and luxury talismans. Lit Chic is glamorous, and it’s influential. Independent bookstores are being reborn, reading clubs are proliferating and BookTok has become one of publishing’s most powerful players.
Why are we suddenly so drawn to the book, not just as literature, but as an object? The resurgence suggests something more complex than nostalgia, trend, or a reaction against chatbots that can now generate lucid prose in seconds. Books offer a tangible link to human authorship, but they also seem to meet a deeper psychological need. Their revival at this unprecedented time of technological transformation points beyond the veneer of Lit Chic towards something that is rooted in our relationship to language.
When singer Dua Lipa, right, and actor Callum Turner married in the spring, they called back to one of the first sparks of their romance with a book-themed celebration.Daily Mail/Shutterstock/Shutterstock
The cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker has argued that language is greater than a cultural invention; it is a biological adaptation. Human beings evolved with and for language, and it is woven into our neural architecture as deeply as vision and movement. Language stands among our species’ defining achievements, and that achievement is now being automated. Even if AI is not replacing human intelligence, it is mastering many of the activities we have long considered evidence of it, like writing, researching, chatting, translating, summarizing and brainstorming. This creates a new existential tension. If thought can be generated on demand, what becomes of thinking? If language is no longer scarce, what becomes of our relationship to it?
This is where what I’m calling the Literature Instinct enters the collective moment, even if we don’t yet recognize it as that. When something essential feels threatened, we become more attached to its physical form. In an age of streaming, vinyl returns; in an age of screens, film cameras regain value; in an age of AI-generated text, the physical book reasserts itself. Unlike text produced by LLMs, a book has weight and permanence. It carries traces of human attention in its pages, emotionally underlined passages with personalized marginalia and peculiar stains, and between its covers, where it preserves a completed act of thought, as opposed to an endlessly modifiable stream. To hold one is to be grounded in a material record of human consciousness and a significance that predates literacy. Long before books were symbols of intelligence, they were symbols of intimacy; which is why Dua Lipa’s book-love narrative feels so familiar and compelling. Our earliest encounters with language involved oral tradition, and more recently, a parent reading at bedtime, a teacher turning pages aloud, a logic of magical words guiding us into sleep. Stories were among our first technologies of attachment; storytelling represented, and still represents, safety, care, belonging and meaning.
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Literature activates what psychologists call Theory of Mind, the cognitive ability to attribute beliefs, desires, emotions, and intentions to oneself and to others. Stories are the foundation of human social interaction that allow us to understand what we are, who others might be, and that thoughts and perspectives differ across spaces. In books, we enter forms of otherness shaped by geography, class, identity, culture and history. We inhabit a grieving mother, a refugee, a 19th-century aristocrat, a garbage collector, a lonely teenager, and we experience their inner lives as our own. For hundreds of pages, we become another self and feel the shame, longing, confusion, grief and joy that they feel. Unlike faster media, the novel refuses to be skimmed or dismissed; it demands sustained attention to contradiction, suffering and ambiguity. In that slow journey, we build empathy. We discover emotional endurance and compassion. Books break our hearts and open our minds. The Literature Instinct, then, even in its Lit Chic performance, may be more than a defence of reading. It may be a species reaching back to an ancient adaptive skill as a defence of the human condition.
For a culture supposedly racing toward the fast and furious future, we spend a remarkable amount of time staging ourselves with books. We take selfies with them, animate dinner parties around them, fall in love through them, and build alliances and identities in relation to them. Their inefficiency, and the way they demand time, attention, and interiority, make books the counterweight of the acceleration era. Reading remains one of the few activities that, once we open the pages and surrender to the movement of a story within us, is not optimizable. It unfolds privately, at human speed, beyond metrics, feeds, notifications, and for now at least, surveillance. As artificial intelligence accelerates and reshapes cultural life, we will navigate this change by anchoring ourselves in the wisdom of book worlds. We will orient our lives through the stories that bind us to our deepest instincts, and to one another.
Which is why, in this electrifying, unfamiliar, hyperconnected age, we want to be reading, and to be seen reading. We are nurturing the sacred, creative spaces of the human spirit where we are subjects rather than objects. Whether we begin with performance or conviction, or with literary aspiration or genuine immersion, books will continue to invite us into quiet encounters in the secret garden of our souls, where imagination wanders freely, untouched by the algorithm.