Not so novel: Could book lovers please stop showing off all the time?
Are bookworms in their show-off era? Or have books always been a useful prop to earn cred? Either way, it means that someone is reading. Let them
Performative reading is not new. Books have been a status symbol since the first printed copy of the Bible rolled off Gutenberg’s press in the 1450s. Today’s bookish show-offs – the ones taking selfies with their just-read pile, posting aesthetic bookshelf décor, photographing their sticky-note annotations, posing with tea + window + novel – they’re only a modern update.
On Goodreads and StoryGraph, it’s hard not to feel a little jealous when someone mentions how many books they’ve read this month. (OMG, five? August isn’t even over yet!) Online, everyone else’s shelf looks so much smarter than yours (Funner too, somehow). There are readers who track chapters the way joggers count the miles they’ve run (Tedious, but so disciplined). And every serious reader is now expected to maintain multiple reading lists: A personal one, one for the book club, one for when you’re tired of the other two. And if you didn’t post a Reel of your group’s silent reading session, did you even go?
“There’s a lot of pressure to finish a certain number of books in a year now,” says Vidhya A Thakkar, 30, book blogger and social-media strategist. Thakkar began reviewing books for her blog, Reader Viddh (@Reader_Viddh) in 2017, and makes her way through 70 to 120 books a year. She lets “the book choose the pace”. So, it seems mildly sus when someone else, who doesn’t do this full-time, claims to have read more in the same period.
Are they really reading? That’s not the point. Once you’ve made your reading habits public, expect judgement. In Japan, novels come in paper jackets to keep the contents private (all the better to enjoy smutty raito noberu on the Metro). But on the Reddit thread, r/bookshelf, users post pictures of their shelves, asking others to comment. Noam Chomsky? You’re prepping for a protest. Yuval Noah Harari? You like your wisdom pre-digested. Young Adult romances? You’re optimistic, maybe a little kinky. Self-help? Red flag; why hasn’t fiction healed you instead? Dostoevsky or Murakami? Ooh, you’ve got refined taste. Every Booker winner, ever? You can’t judge literary merit by yourself.
Of course, reading is good. Reading more is better. “If you’re picking up a book, you’re already doing something right,” Thakkar says. But reading for social validation, reading mostly to make the book club like you, reading just to endlessly debate a fan – that’s no longer about the books. “I don’t attend book clubs or discussions for this reason,” says Thakkar. “How much can you dissect one piece of literature?”
Ashley Tisdale, in a home-tour video in 2022, not only showed off a well-stocked book case, she also pretended to be, in her own tired phrasing, a “voracious reader”. She only revealed later that the books had been bought a few days earlier, for the shoot. The books in Dakota Johnson’s house (like the famous lemons) were for show too. Grimes trolled us all in 2021 by saying she read The Communist Manifesto. She was once in a relationship with Elon Musk, hardly a Marx-approved match.
Across art, books have been symbols of privilege, refinement and power. Women used them to signal that they were literate and had time for leisure. Men clutched them in portraits to show serious intent. In the Insta age, a book might simply mean that someone has the discipline to finish a whole novel despite the pinging distraction of a screen. “Even then, we shouldn’t judge people by how they read, what they read, and the way they interact with the book,” says Thakkar. If you enjoy spy thrillers or Harry Potter fanfic, you do you. “People criticise writers such as Ravinder Singh and Chetan Bhagat, but they paved the way for Indian readers. If I hadn’t read those books then, I wouldn’t be reading everything I do now.”
From HT Brunch, August 23, 2025
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