According to [this GQ article](https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/hottest-status-books-2024?utm_source=digg&fbclid=IwAR07cc4fHLUhlza6lXsuy0byb9oJnZAe0azVirSuinjPQR13xTI9WfXrQ94), the latest trend among the glamorous is ‘hot guy books’.
Which is to say, celebrities posing with literary classics on Instagram in order to make them seem intellectual, or normal people ‘accidentally’ leaving some Sartre peeking out of their back pocket to impress strangers on the bus.
I found this funny, partly because pretending to read books you don’t actually read is always funny, and also because in order to be effective the books have to be instantly recognisable, which means they often end up being kind of ‘entry-level’ classics that most people who genuinely read a lot wouldn’t be in any way impressed with.
I’m interested in what you would consider the opposite of hot guy books. *Goblin boy books*, if you will.
I’m talking about books that no celebrity would ever allow on their carefully-curated Instagram feed, not because they are controversial or anything, just because they would never be considered ‘cool’. Books that speak to someone have genuinely obscure, weird interests or being nerdy in a way that could never be made acceptable by ‘geek chic’.
I’d like to nominate Brian Lumley’s *Necroscope* series. Paperback 80s horror novels, covered in vampire skulls. Impossible to imagine, for example, Bella Hadid holding one of these – they are exclusively the preserve of greasy weirdos (*source: I am a greasy weirdo and I own all of them*).
by autophobe2e