The Case for Thinking People's Fiction: From the Brontes to Bridgerton

Noah Broyles: Hey guys! on the podcast, as a way to enter the new year and a new batch of episodes, we discussed sequels. We're pivoting our discussion now to a contemplation of what we here at Inkshares like to call "thinking person's fiction." That might sound lofty, but we're starting from a pretty simple premise. A lot of the books on shelves and movies and theaters these days feel stupid. Why is that? And what do we do about it? Adam and I are both recording episodes on the subject. We're not sure which will go up first, but in case it's this one, I just wanted to say welcome or welcome back to Unedited, where we discuss everything from stupid to smart, from idea to manuscript, and from shelf to screen. Part One: Where We Are. Someone says to you that books these days feel stupid. They're derivative, they're dumbed down, they're clickbaity, they're fashion statements instead of actual thinking person's fiction. Would you agree? Yes or no, it'd be tough to argue we're witnessing a zenith in literary creativity right now. Barnes and Noble is experiencing a renaissance off the back of BookTok ⁓ actual book reviewers are shutting down. see the recent demise of the Washington Post's book section. New imprints from big publishers deliver more all-you-can-eat spice options than Buffalo Wild Wings, but most surveys still evidence a slump in the public's interest in reading, a 40 % slump, according to a 2025 study by the University of Florida and University College London. Serious writers are still publishing books, but it'd be hard to think of a contemporary literary celebrity along the lines of past generations Lord Byron, Oscar Wilde, Ernest Hemingway, or Cormac McCarthy. Neil Gaiman, me tooed. J.K. Rowling, canceled. The Pulitzer Foundation is still giving out prizes, as are a dozen other organizations, but they remain largely aftermarket stamps of approval, not trendsetters. And meritorious as those prize winners may be, they're not the defining works of our time. More often, they're hearkenings back to older times and titles. Think of the 2025 Pulitzer winner James by Percival Everett, a retelling of Huckleberry Finn, or the 2023 winner Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, directly inspired by Charles Dickens's David Copperfield. Maybe they'll be classics. But the imagination of our reading culture, or what's left of it, is, at present, firmly in the grip of a different coterie. Reheated rivalries, thornier courts of roses, and however many more dragon rides Rebecca Yarros decides to give. Part Two: What Defines Where We Are? All this isn't simply to say, Romantasy popular, Romantasy bad. It is to say that reading about breeding has reached a fever pitch at the same moment that highbrow literature has become inbred with buzzwords to the point of losing authenticity. All this lead someone to say, books these days feel stupid, and they'd be right. But were books markedly better 50 or 100 years ago? What are we comparing today's Amazon bestsellers to when we call them stupid? Part 3. What defines where we were? It's easy to say books used to be better, or writers used to be smarter, or readers used to have better taste. But everything's a matter of proportion and availability. Before writing off our modern stories as slop and retreating into the past, we need to remember what stories are. What fiction is. At root, fiction is communication. It's an author speaking to a reader. It's a storyteller speaking to a listener. It's a set of minds trying to draw closer together by sharing thoughts. The circumstances under which that sharing, that communication happen, are very important for its content and its effect. Few will argue the authors of 2026 are more talented than Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Edith Wharton, or Virginia Woolf. But it's not fair to compare an author writing in the or the to one writing today. Times have changed. Technology has changed. Communication has changed. What makes Jane Austen's novels inherently smarter than Bridgerton? It's that Pride and Prejudice understands the morals it is preaching, what it's communicating, while Bridgerton does not. Bridgerton thinks it's a takedown of toxic masculinity and repressive society, but it does so while wearing, and sometimes not wearing, the beloved garb of a regency society that existed because of the rules-based order Austen understood. Bridgerton tries to both enjoy and overthrow a land of gowns, ballrooms, and carriage rides, to be the naughtier, spicier, rules-breaking version of Jane Austen without understanding that the rules are the whole point. This isn't the new version of Jane Austen. It's the stupider version. Part 4: How We Got Here. Sometimes it's okay to like stupid things. The trouble comes when we stop recognizing stupid. Or worse, when we start preferring stupid over smart. An earlier version of this essay was going to make the case that stupid books are everywhere because we've lost touch with the canon. The canon basically is the list of classics. There's debate over who should and shouldn't be in the canon. But the 101 version with Homer, Beowulf, Shakespeare, and Dickens is pretty standard. And despite AI writing most of the essays in English departments nowadays, I don't think we are where we are because high schoolers didn't read Suetonius's Lives of the Caesars in Latin. Hyperbole aside, the explanation for stupid isn't a lack of canon awareness. There are more feminist retellings of Greek myths each year than heads on a hydra. Hamnet is about Hamlet. Gatsby memes are as evergreen as the light on Daisy's dock, and new Beowulf translations won't stop rolling off the press. bros pause their fitness podcasts to listen to Marcus Aurelius, and dads contemplate the Roman Empire while walking the dog. At least, that's what the internet told me. Romantasy's massive queen was inspired by French fairy tales, particularly Beauty and the Beast, to construct her court of spiky flowers. Our knowledge of the canon is balefully basic, yes, but certainly not dead. So how did we get here? Invariably, essays on the decline of books and reading blame technology. I'm going to do that too, not to say that technology killed good books, but that technology made books turn stupid. Remember, fiction is a form of communication. It's someone speaking and you, the reader, listening. It's a very active, very concentrated form of listening. It takes work. It takes focus. It takes certain conditions, like a light source and a relatively open block of time. At first, technology helped with some of that. Electric lights extended reading hours. But when technology entered the realm of communication, reading had to adapt. Trains sped up letters. Telegraphy reinvented private and public communication. Think of things like newspapers, which could report day of instead of days or weeks later. A new ubiquity to travel contributed to the rise of cheap, portable dime novels, which could be absorbed in a bumping wagon or a busy train car, or at home after a long and now legislatively defined workday or work week. Faster means more. More reading options and eventually more listening and viewing options. Radio replaced phonograph, TV replaced radio. Communication came from all directions, which means naturally attention divided. It had to. Read a novel or watch a show? Which promises more of what is desired? Since there were options, the options had to compete. That meant more extremes. Catchier covers, brasher titles, easier access, more forbidden fruit than could be found in other newer, more regulated mediums. Fiction is communication, and fiction had to start shouting to be heard. And like most shouted things, it got stupid. Nowadays, spice meters, trigger warnings, blurbs bundled with buzzwords, and reviews tailored to a very hungry algorithm funnel what gets read and what gets ignored. Most of what makes it through is pretty stupid. Everything aims to grab our attention harder and harder until it's fractured, which is exactly what social media and entertainment consumption today represents. good news to no one that movies and streaming shows are now being made with more and repeated expository dialogue so that viewers who are simultaneously scrolling on their phones can keep up with the story. Part Five: How to Get Back. Books aren't by nature holy sanctums of entertainment and enlightenment. As long as there have been novels, there have been stupid novels. But when novels were the only real whales swimming through the deep sea of reader attention, they had more ability to mature. To take the next step in the millennia-long conversation that is the Western canon, instead of giving it a quick and liberating slash empowering slash problematizing slash, insert your buzzword here, twist. Herman Melville drew on personal experience, painstaking research, and deep familiarity with the Bible and a bunch of other books to write America's greatest novel of the sea. But why do that when he could have written a harpoon sharp romance between Captain Ahab and Moby Dick? Or did he? Attention is the operative word in all this. with so much communication, the best outcomes occur when we're actually paying attention. When we aren't, things get sloppy. Things get stupid. Most readers in 2026 and a good portion of authors are only interested in the canon so far as they can name check it or ride its coattails or borrow some cred. mention here a Romantasy novel called For Whom the Belle, that's Bell with an E, Tolls and say no more But how many who see that title on TikTok will even have heard of Hemingway, let alone read his story of the Spanish Civil War? How many will know it's stupid? And how many will simply click from TikTok to Amazon to add to cart. We can escape stupid, but only if we want to. What we pay our attention to is key. Fiction is a form of communication. Better vocabulary, more practice, and a deeper reservoir of knowledge results in better communication. Translated to books, this means an acquaintance with the good stuff, the smart stuff, the canon. It means finding the energy to pay attention to what's already been said, to not chase the shiny or trendy object. Maybe that shiny object is stupid. Maybe it's not. But the only way you'll know stupid is if you first know smart.