Eudaimonic reading: Reading routines on BookTube as ‘self-making-machines’

<tn:p>The article examines how, through what is here referred to as ‘routines’, reading is integrated into the social context of everyday life and how such reading routines as “technologies of the self” (Foucault) are part of a more general trend towards optimising the self. Studying reading routines on BookTube can help to understand how vloggers in digital reading culture navigate the sometimes conflicting demands of what Andreas Reckwitz calls the creativity dispositif, aiming for both personal growth and social recognition. In order to examine reading routines as ‘self-making-machines’, the article focuses on two reading vlogs on BookTube: one which addresses general strategies for self-improvement through reading and one which specifically focuses on the social habitus associated with reading ‘classics’. It will be argued that reading routines firstly document the process of working on the self by means of reading habits and book choices and secondly stage reading scenes, thus performatively shaping the reader as subject and the subject as reader.</tn:p>