Why DIY syllabus is taking over Substack and Bookstagram

The Rise of the Social Syllabus

Reading lists have always been a little seductive. The “canon,” the “Great Books,” the “must-reads before 30” each attempts to order chaos by distilling the infinite into the finite. What is new is the transformation of these lists into miniature curricula, and their performance on social media.

On BookTok, the corner of TikTok devoted to literature, creators film themselves drafting syllabi. Perhaps, a week of fantasy epics, a month of feminist memoirs, a semester’s worth of Dickens. On Bookstagram, the same impulse is visual with grids of eye-catching book covers lined up beneath headings such as Modernist Summer or Dark Academia Autumn. On Substack, the syllabus has become a genre of its own. Writers publish newsletters pairing novels with films and essays around themes such as exile, desire, or resistance. One essayist even revived her undergraduate coursework for her subscribers, offering a serialised tour through the novels, theorists, and arguments that once shaped her degree.

In some sense, these digital syllabi echo an older tradition. When Columbia University introduced its “Core Curriculum” in 1919, or when Mortimer Adler published the Great Books of the Western World series in the fifties, the syllabus was not just a list but a worldview, an attempt to declare what counted as essential knowledge. Today’s BookTok lists are humbler, even playful. Still, the instinct is the same: to bring order to abundance by arranging texts into a sequence, to pretend, for a moment, that infinity can be tamed.

 

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Nostalgia for school

Why does the word curriculum hold such sway? Partly because it conjures nostalgia: sharpened pencils, Norton anthologies, the thrill of a new semester. Even for those who hated school, there is a longing for the structure it imposed. As one newsletter writer put it, planning a monthly syllabus delivers the same dopamine hit as registering for college courses.

The trend also gestures toward a more personal anxiety, the fear that our attention has dissolved. Surrounded by algorithmic feeds, people confess they want to “retrain” their brains. A self-authored syllabus, however provisional, offers a way back to the discipline of reading. Roland Barthes once suggested that the pleasure of the text lay not only in reading but in arranging, in constructing one’s own canon. The online curriculum makes that impulse public.

And there is the lure of community. When a BookTok creator assigns Jane Eyre as part of her “English unit,” commenters pledge to join. A Substack syllabus pairing Achebe with Coetzee becomes the starting point for email threads and comment-box debates. Online, the syllabus thrives because no grades are at stake.

 

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From whimsy to workload

Of course, whimsy can harden into workload. Some syllabi are charmingly eccentric, comprisong Palme d’Or winners, Mary-Kate and Ashley movies, or a month dedicated to cookie recipes. Others veer into the exhausting, sliding into glow-up culture, including rigid fitness regimens and beauty treatments presented as “curricula.” At that point, the syllabus risks becoming another branch of optimisation, where every month is a test of productivity rather than curiosity.

BookTok and Bookstagram, for all their excesses, have already altered publishing, catapulting novels into bestsellerdom. Substack has become a kind of parallel university, where syllabi circulate freely and essays replace lectures. This is the genius of the curriculum trend. It reclaims the syllabus not as an instrument of authority but as a personalised art form: a list that says, here are the books I might read, the questions I might pursue, the conversations I might join. In an era obsessed with outcomes, the act of drafting a curriculum, is proof that curiosity still matters.