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Books are inherently political, and we disregard that truth at our own peril.
If that statement makes you uncomfortable, if your first reaction is to close down and protect your beloved books by saying, “I don’t read for politics, I read to escape,” you’re not alone.
Most of us read in large part for entertainment and escapism. In fact, entertainment is the door we choose to walk through every time we pick up a piece of fiction.
But if it is the only reason, if you are willing to disregard everything else a book does in favor of entertainment, you are in greater danger than you realize.
Let me explain why.
Every book ever written has been informed by the worldview of the author. And that worldview has, in turn, been shaped by the political climate in which they live. For that to make sense, let’s define politics in a broad sense.
Politics: the process and systems by which societies structure power and distribute resources.
Those political systems govern who gets to learn to read, who gets to write what books, what themes they can write about, which books get published, by whom, and who can access those books.
Unfortunately, the first priority of the power structures we live within isn’t to ensure the art that reaches the public represents the varied truth of human experience; it is to protect itself. It recognizes the power of fiction to shape worldviews, create empathy, and incite change. It recognizes that art and culture shape and create one another, so it will always default to prioritizing books and stories that uphold and protect the ruling class by centering their identity as normal or neutral, and suppress or destroy narratives that challenge it.
If anyone should inherently understand the political power of books to incite change, create empathy, and spread knowledge, it should be authors and readers. So to see so many of them denigrate or entirely ignore that power in favor of guiltless entertainment is disheartening in the extreme, not only because of what it says about how they view books but because of what it says about how they view their fellow humans.
You may say, “I read to escape my life. I just want to be entertained, not write a book report.” And you wouldn’t be entirely wrong. So, let's look at what happens when we read “brain off” for entertainment only without acknowledging the inherently political nature of books.
As I’ve already pointed out, reading for entertainment is important. As Ursula K. LeGuin said of fantasy in her essay The Language of the Night, “Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don't we consider it his duty to escape? The moneylenders, the know-nothings, the authoritarians have us all in prison; if we value the freedom of the mind and soul, if we're partisans of liberty, then it's our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can.”
It is both natural and healthy to escape into a fictional narrative to restore hope and give ourselves a much-needed break from our daily struggles. But that isn’t where the story ends. Far from it, in fact. LeGuin wasn’t encouraging escapism from responsibility or engagement, but escapism into the freedom of mind and soul to imagine new worlds and reclaim what our world could be.
She doesn’t encourage mindless consumption of stories but excoriates the political oppression that causes us to need escapism in the first place. She recognizes that escapism and active engagement exist side-by-side.
When we consume mindlessly, without recognizing the power inherent in stories and the deeply political nature of them, we are fed on a diet we did not actively choose. We are forced to eat what those in political power choose for us, merely for the hedonistic pleasure of it, without a thought for how the nutrition will affect our bodies in the long run.
We become mindless consumers who unconsciously support and uphold those currently in power while ignoring those marginalized by the same power. This act is especially insidious because the stories we are fed are comforting. They represent us and how we hope to see ourselves. Because of that, we will then protect our right to access them and to resist change.
In essence, this makes us agents of the system who are never forced to confront the fact that the system actively hurts, disenfranchises, exploits, and erases our fellow human beings to perpetuate itself.
When we read, even when we aren’t actively aware of it, we consume thoughts and ideas that shape our worldview. Being cognizant of that fact allows us to engage with the work more deeply and to interrogate what it means and how/whether we want it to affect us. It lets us enjoy the entertainment and escapism of books while also understanding how they affect us and the world we live in.
But refusing to acknowledge the inherently political aspect of books is damaging because it makes us mindless consumers who will open our mouths for anything. It strips books of their power to inform and create change. It accepts the status quo as normal and neutral, which abandons the people whose identities have not been protected, who have not been represented but have actively been suppressed, attacked, or undermined.
When you say “books are only political if you want them to be,” what you’re really saying is “I have the privilege of not having to think about the implications of the work I am consuming, and I don’t really care to know how it negatively affects those without the privilege.”
To be human is to be in community—to care about those who stand next to us, because the welfare of one affects the welfare of all. And anything that asks us to empathize with one another, to understand those who do not look like us, to question systems of power and privilege—that is not a distraction from fiction’s purpose. It is the purpose.
Books can delight and distract. But they also illuminate, challenge, and liberate. When we understand their power, we don’t have to give up escapism—we get to choose our escapes with open eyes. And maybe find the courage to bring some of those imagined freedoms back with us when we return to the real world.
