“Who’s still reading?” was the motto of this year’s Leipzig Book Fair. Anyone who looked around the full exhibition halls could see that young people actually read books – with great enthusiasm.
If you walked through the halls of this year’s book fair, you would see them standing in long lines: book-loving people, especially teenagers and young adults, most of them female. Many with full book bags, deep in conversation, laughing, chatting.
It’s not just their favorite authors that they spend hours waiting for in queues that run through the entire hall: what attracts them are the books. Especially “New Adult” novels. Stories about growing up, great love, written emotionally and stirringly. And laughed at by many: the pink-pastel covers, the elaborate color cuts with floral motifs and the cheesy titles: “Room Wanted. Love Found” or: “Kissed by Flames”.
Special editions for young audiences
But fans love exactly that. For them, the novels are objects with which they proudly decorate their bookshelves. Publishers have long recognized the great demand. They offered special editions for the book fair. This also attracted young people to Leipzig. They read and network on platforms like TikTok and meet in the long lines at the Leipzig Book Fair.
Their motto this year was: “Who’s still reading?” (“Who actually reads anymore?”). The crowds in the halls show: it’s the young too. Generation Z, who are always accused of being attached to their smartphones and no longer being able to engage in long texts. This involves reading. But not just the books that are praised by seasoned literary critics. Hundreds of pages long novels about the lives of young people and about the dream worlds in which they take refuge.
Food for the imagination
But why blame them and dismiss the “New Adult” genre? “Everything but flat” – to take up the motto of the host country Netherlands/Flanders, are also the books that attract young readers to Leipzig: In addition to “new adult” novels, manga and comics.
This literature also comes from the old cultural technique of reading. It opens up space for the imagination and encourages you to empathize with other characters and stories. In other words: Reading – even reading books with colorful clouds of color on the cover – makes you empathetic.
In times when others, strangers, are so often the target of trite right-wing hate messages, reading is itself a question of democracy. In other words: a book is never as flat as a smartphone.