Reading isn’t supposed to be for show. In fact, sitting down with a book, ideally in a calm and quiet space, is one of the few activities in our hyper-online world that offers us respite away from our screens. There’s safety within a book’s pages; it’s a space where nobody is announcing their engagement with a staged photoshoot, or bragging about their #gifted holiday to the Maldives. This is a time for creativity, solitude, and peace. Or at least, there was. Now, it seems that books are offering us something a little more filtered; Valencia-filtered, to be specific.
Welcome to performative reading – a way of consuming books that is less about words than it is suddenly all about aesthetics. Authors are thrilled. The idea is to pick up a book that you want to be seen reading as a way of signalling your intellect to the world by way of the latest Fitzcarraldo Edition or a beaten-down Penguin Classics paperback.
