Humanities & Cultures

This is performative worrying. Just ignore social media and do what you want. It's not worth wasting time on.

I agree with others here that generally you should just read what you want and fuck em all. But if you are the kind of person who gets anxiety about this sort of thing (hello, it's me), I gotta say that an e-reader is a great solution to this problem. Also means you can read Infinite Jest without having to lug around all 1000+ pages everywhere you go.

So a terminally online person is going to tweet about how they saw some idiot pretending to read the Metamorphosis on the metro?

Yeah this is rage bait. Just read what you want and enjoy your life.

Get a fake cover for it with the title How to Pretend to Read in Public.

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.

This makes me want to get a copy of A Critique of Pure Reason for the bus... I'm actually just using it to hide my yaoi manga.

We have so little time on this beautiful earth and the writer of this article chose to focus on this instead of how beautiful butterflies are, or something lovely and true.