I consider no activity more luxurious than posting up at a bar solo with a good book. The creasing of a paperback in one hand, the weight of a wine glass in the other, the feeling of being alone in a crowd of people all make for a lovely evening. Or at least, I thought so, until recently, when two twentysomethings approached me during this ritual. “Are you reading alone?” one asked. “I could neverrrr,” the other said, and then uttered the universal mean girl slight: “I wish I had your confidence.”
Reading in public – not cool. Or at least “performative reading”, as it’s been dubbed on social media, is worthy of ridicule.
Not long ago, during the peak years of corny millennial humor, we celebrated @HotDudesReading, an Instagram account-turned-book that showed attractive men toting books on trains and park benches. Now, god forbid anyone (hot dudes included) enjoy a moment of escapism during the capitalist grind, or else they might end up in someone’s mocking post. To quote the caption of one popular meme depicting an anonymous train passenger reading a Brit lit classic: “Poser art himbo on the subway barely 10 pages into his performative copy of Frankenstein.”
There is definitely a spectrum of performativeness in public reading, with “Grimes sitting on the sidewalk in designer distressed clothing, reading the Communist Manifesto” at one end, and sitting in a chair at a coffee shop at the other.
We’re performative every day; it’s not like the clothes we wear and how we style ourselves and the choices of people we hang out with in public aren’t also performances that we use to signal information to others. Whether that performance rises to the level of performativeness (derogatory) is mostly just in the eye of the beholder: A non-reader might see any public reading as performative. A non-activist might see any activism as performative. Etc.