Apps like Goodreads and Letterboxd have become increasingly popular in recent years, allowing users a means to log, rate and review media. The apps track books, movies and TV shows, respectively, and provide opportunities to discover new recommendations and interact with other fans of the media content.
It is easy to see the appeal of these apps when it is such a convenient way to track media consumption. I made my Goodreads account around age 14, and looked forward to rating and reviewing books after I finished them, alongside seeing the cover pictures accumulate on my profile.
I look back and cringe at my May 2021 review of “Looking for Alaska.”
“Unremarkable skinny white boy becomes infatuated by quirky, ‘intelligent’ manic pixie dream girl,” I wrote. “They smoke a lot of cigarettes, say a lot of ‘deep’ metaphorical stuff and make obscure literary and historical references to further demonstrate how they are superior to and smarter than everyone else.”
Nowadays, I would say that my 14-year-old self was making harsh commentary in attempts to take a pretentious stance on a book I read in less than 24 hours, oblivious to the fact that the book in question intentionally set up that “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” trope and attempted to subvert it in the latter half of the story. Naively, I flattened the novel into the very thing it was meant to generate commentary on.
I read “Looking For Alaska” and most of John Green’s other books — who’s no longer my sworn enemy, by the way — during the COVID-19 pandemic, while I was in school online. Like many of us, I had way more free time than anyone should have during their formative years, and spent all of the time I didn’t allocate to extreme levels of screen time reading.
I had loved books all my life, but during this era, I read with a renowned vigor, with Goodreads as my vessel. It quickly became a game. If I could finish a 300-page book in three days, what was the harm in starting another? I read over 100 books that year, something I was smugly proud of at the time.
Impressive as it may seem, I’m sure that I was reading passively, skimming and not thinking much about the content I was ingesting. Last summer, a TikTok creator came under fire for claiming she “read” 100 books in a week, when in reality she was using an app that generated AI summaries of books and reading those. Most laughed the situation off as another example of someone lying online for engagement, or shuddered at it as an example of near-dystopian anti-intellectualism surrounded by low-level literacy rates in the United States, akin to something out of Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451.”
When I stumbled across this drama, I couldn’t help being reminded of my own detached, accumulative approach to reading that I had shed over the years.
Letterboxd raises the same issue for film fans. The app is relatively innocuous — a fun, social tracking app for movie lovers — but can create pressure to watch purely for the sake of logging a movie, accompanied, of course, by a snappy, sarcastic review.
In October 2024, singer Ethel Cain uploaded a lengthy rant to her then-active Tumblr account about the lack of sincerity regarding how people engage with art and the inclination to let the joke overtake the original media.
This phenomenon plagues Letterboxd, with movie review pages looking more and more like a wittiest one-liner competition. It can be embarrassingly vulnerable to simply say that you connected with something on an emotional level without the bumper of irony, but it’s a vulnerability we’re desperate for.
A few years after my scathing “Looking For Alaska” review, I read Jandy Nelson’s “I’ll Give You The Sun,” which I reviewed — “the John Greenification of YA contemporaries needs to be studied.” Looking back, I don’t understand the need for the dig. I liked the book enough to give it a rating of four-out-of-five stars, but in lieu of explaining why, I diminished the story with the sarcastic gripe.
This is exactly what Cain was referring to — why couldn’t I say anything of substance about a work I enjoyed?
As my classes and extracurriculars amped up, I read a lot less throughout high school, reaching numbers closer to 20 books per year instead of triple digits. I read Donna Tartt’s “The Secret History” with a friend my senior year, a kind of casual two-person book club. The following summer, I watched “Beautiful Boy” for the first time, and afterward read the book of the same name by David Sheff and “Tweak” by Nic Sheff, both memoirs about the real individuals the film is based on.
I logged all three books on my Goodreads account, but refrained from rating them. I enjoyed reading both memoirs, but their subject matter was sensitive. It felt reductive to discredit either author’s experience on the grounds of one being better written or paced than the other. I loved “The Secret History,” but certainly didn’t possess the breadth of knowledge on Greek tragedy to grasp every facet of the novel. These were among the only books I read for enjoyment in 2025, but I can confidently say I connected with all three far more than any book I read during my serial-reader days.
That said, if you pride yourself on being a reader, a film buff or whatever else, I implore you to take a look at how you consume media. Try something new, take a break or write a little about your thoughts on your most recent read or watch. What do you gain from the media you consume? Is it an attempt to prove something to other people? To yourself?
Ask yourself — what are you consuming for?
Megan Buchovecky is a freshman majoring in philosophy, politics and law.
Views expressed in the opinions pages represent the opinions of the columnists. The only piece that represents the view of the Pipe Dream Editorial Board is the Staff Editorial.