The Epidemic of Performative Reading

Rachel MacLaren

For months we all heard about that photo of Jacob Elordi—you know, the one where he’s caught with a book tucked into his back pocket. I’ll admit, I love a good Jess Mariano-core comeback, but I also think it’s created a domino effect among readers. Suddenly, boys are racing to sit in coffee shops with a Dostoevsky propped open for all to see. What was once a space for community–online reading, book clubs–now feels like a stage set. With the rise of “shelfies” (yes, they really call them that) and aesthetically arranged annotations, reading has started to look less like a hobby and more of a performance. Everywhere I look, people are reading...or at least, trying to look like they are.

Reading has become a transaction; where the focus was once about what the book is, and now it’s about what the book does for you. May it be proof of intelligence, taste, or discipline, we’ve taken something intimate and solitary and turned it into another way to brand ourselves. I mean, why do we feel the need to be seen reading? Is it perhaps to appease the growing monster in our phones–social media?

Social media didn’t invent the desire to appear smart; people have been performing intellect forever—but what it did do is give us the access and tools to prove it. In that process, we’ve lost permission to be private with our thoughts and to let our reading be ours alone. Now, every book becomes a potential post and every annotation is up for a critical eye to signal taste. We aren’t just reading anymore; we’re curating evidence that we read, and I think that obsession with appearing “well-read” is robbing us of what drew us to books in the first place. Reading used to be a deeply personal encounter with language: a world for you, the author, and the text to exist in together. It didn’t matter if you read fast or slow, if you cried at the wrong parts or not at all, or even if you hated a book everyone else loved. You could be confused or bored and that was okay because nobody was watching. Nobody cared what you read or what you thought about it because that experience was radically, entirely yours.

That intimacy collapses when reading becomes a show for others. Suddenly, your book choices become statements. Those private moments–the ones where you yell at a page because it genuinely doesn’t make sense–between you and a book require an audience now...and that audience has opinions. There’s a growing blight on reading communities which were once a genuine place to share and discuss literature, and that blight is heavily influenced by appearance rather than experience.

What we have lost in the process of self-surveillance disguised as self-expression is permission: the freedom to be an imperfect reader, to have messy, unpolished reactions about what we’re reading, and to allow a book to affect us in a way that doesn’t translate into a caption—to just exist in experience. That’s not something you can teach or perform. It’s what you feel when nobody is watching, and maybe that’s what we need to protect the most: the ability to be utterly human with a book again.