THE EMPTY PAGE

Can modern life get more ick than performative reading? As cringey as show-off book lovers sound, perhaps anything that gets people off screens should be praised

- By Olivia Petter

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.

The trend has been heavily attributed to men - see the viral @hotdudesreading Instagram account - but it seems that lots of us are getting in on the act - or performance - or at the very least, trying to track down the chicest-looking books around. Mostly, this means sourcing them secondhand.

According to Vinted, secondhand book sales are at an all-time high, with the pre-loved book market reaching £1.06bn in 2024. The retail platform has noted how fantasy franchises and collector editions are particularly popular, with some collectors selling Penguin Orange Editions from the 1940s and 1950s.

Of course, not all of these are being bought for showing-off purposes. Some people really just want to save money or read in a more sustainable way.