A trip to your local Target or Wal Mart will reveal something that might be shocking: reading is really, really popular. While there is a myriad of reasons for this resurgence, many point to social media as a huge reason people have returned to reading. In this course, we will read prose fiction that has become popular in various online circles, including Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), Sally Rooney’s Normal People (2018), and R. F. Kuang’s  Babel (2022), to explore about why these books (and others like them) have become popular. We will use these popular texts to think about different key concepts and ideas in literary studies and apply them to both “literary” and popular texts. Along the way, we will also read contemporary writing about the popularity of reading as it relates to social media and what this says about contemporary reading practices and the way publishing trends impact readership. To round out our reading list, students will also propose and vote on a final text that we will all read as a class to ensure that the course reflects our own trends in contemporary reading. More broadly, students will learn the tools of literary criticism in shorter writing assignments and weekly reflective writing to develop arguments for two papers throughout the semester.