People poring over highbrow novel on trains and posing with philosophical tomes online are an everyday sight, but all may not be what it seems.
"Performative reading" is a trend that has trickled down from the celebrity world, amid a spreading belief that there's more value in appearing to read an impressive title than in actually doing so.
'Trendy books' For some members of Gen Z, books have become "a symbol not of intelligence" but of "hotness", said Allegra Handelsman in The Times last summer. Performative reading is everywhere, from "tattooed creatives, smoking cigarettes while staring at Marcus Aurelius's 'Meditations' on a beach in Ibiza", to the single man reading, or "at least appearing to read", feminist literature "in the hope of pretty girls sliding into his DMs".
The phenomenon has been growing since 2021, when a "boom" in book clubs led by celebrities, plus "BookTok", the section of TikTok dedicated to promoting and discussing commercial fiction, turned favoured books into a "trend-driven accessory", said Sarah Manavis in The New Statesman. These "trendy books" go viral not because of their "quality" but because they fit an "increasingly fashionable, pseudo-intellectual aesthetic".
Finger-wagging The "commodification of intellect" isn't new, said Manavis, but the perception of books as "an accessory, rather than an art", risks publishers focusing their efforts on books that are "feed-friendly".
There's no denying that the virality of literature has led to an uptick in book sales, said Chloe Mac Donnell in The Guardian last year: in 2023, 669 million physical books were sold, the highest overall total ever recorded, with Gen Z as a key driver of those sales.
One of life's "simplest pleasures" remains "falling into a story" and "tuning the world out", without "worrying about what someone’s going to think of you", said Alaina Demopoulos in The Guardian. Many people are still doing exactly that, so rather than "finger-wagging" about performative reading, next time you see someone with a book at the coffee shop or the park, leave them be: they're just "enjoying the vibes". |