Perfomative Reading: When It's Pretentious and When It's Purposeful
Pretending to read isn't always a crime—sometimes, it's a skill
There’s a point in time in which every reader comes to the heart-wrenching realization that no matter how many books they read or plan to read in their lifetime, it’ll still be an infinitesimal collection compared to the tremendous number of published works available in the world.
According to an estimate by Google Books, there are roughly 160 million books in existence today—and that’s not even counting the lost works of ancient times and the ones history has no record of. That said, if humans were to be immortal in this life, and if someone were to read a book a day (impossible, but bear with me), it would take them 438, 356 years to finish. This means it would require outliving human civilization itself by thousands of years just to catch up with its intellectual output.
So many books, so little time.
I was doing my online reading the other day when I stumbled upon an article that expressed a rather unsettling sentiment in relation to this:
“This encounter with the infinity of available books offers a certain encouragement not to read at all. Faced with a quantity of books so vast that nearly all of them must remain unknown, how can we escape the conclusion that even a lifetime of reading is utterly in vain?
The article turned out to be a three-page excerpt from a book titled How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, written by French academic Pierre Bayard (find the link to the article at the end of this post).
The idea of learning to talk about unread books first sounded paradoxical—for isn’t our goal as readers to know books well enough to be able to talk about them, and don’t we know books by reading them?
I could not help but think of this as some kind of pretension, for why would I want to talk about a book as if I’ve read it? Why should I pretend?
And that’s what got me thinking about performative reading in general, and the many ways we already pretend with our reading.
Reading as a performance: quantity and quality
There used to be a time when being seen with a book or, say, a newspaper, in public was of the most ordinary occurrences. No one questioned it. No one stopped what they were doing to admire the fact that a reader was out in the wild.
Today, with technology’s monopolization of our daily media consumption comes the simultaneous archaicization of analog media. It wouldn’t be an overstatement to claim that the act of reading itself is now seen as archaic; our need for instant gratification has rendered reading the strenuous alternative to readily available bite-sized information and streamed entertainment. If I had a penny for each time I’ve heard someone say the likes of “I don’t read—I don’t have the patience,” I’d have enough to purchase most of the books on my TBR list.
And because patience is a virtue, reading has turned into something of high moral value.
Expectedly, someone following that logic would be inclined to believe that the more they read and retain, the better. They are likely to associate the quality of being “well-read” with the number of books they consume and quotes and ideas they can recite from memory. But being “well-read,” as Robin Waldun nicely puts in his podcast, A Mug of Insights, has less to do with that and more with being able to internalize the wisdom within the books you read—no matter how few—to gradually develop your own opinion on different subjects and life in general. It is about transcending what is written before you such that the quotes you thought would need memorizing start to serve the purpose of supporting your views, not making them.
But it just so happens that the social apps we use for discovering literature and connecting with other readers tend to reinforce this read-more-books-to-be-more-well-read logic. Goodreads, for example, makes it a point to show the world how many books you’ve shelved; how many you’ve read, how many you plan to read.
The mere quantification of something—its representation as a number that can be increased or decreased—flares up our competitive instinct. Setting a reading challenge every new year creates that sense of urgency we tend to get when faced with a deadline. As a result, reading ceases to be that pleasurable, intimate practice of learning about the world and yourself, of feeling, of growing. It becomes yet another task to be completed, yet another number to be shown off for the sake of external validation.
I am not discouraging the use of Goodreads or the setting of reading goals. But if you’re someone who finds themselves failing to meet their annual reading goal every December, I do encourage you to rethink the number of books you set for yourself. If you believe the number is high and more than what you can realistically pursue, ask yourself: “Who am I doing this for?”.
My first year on Goodreads, I set a 100-book challenge. I failed it miserably, even while speeding through certain works and choosing shorter novels on purpose. The year after, I cut it by half. Still failed miserably. Tried again the following year. Failed again. It was after I asked myself that one question that I realized I had chosen a hundred, then fifty, books for the sake of others’ affirmation; I had preferred to experience that short-lived rush of dopamine I got when someone was impressed by the number on my profile over the long-term benefits of meaningful, proper engagement with fewer books. I’m currently on my second year of reading just 15 to 20 books, and I feel more fulfilled.
In other words, when we go for quantity over quality reading, we are inevitably performing.
The problem, though, is that while many of us may have taken that step toward more authentic reading by disregarding our book count, we still perform when we fall into the trap of aestheticizing what we read.
The age of social media is also the age of aesthetics. Everything captured—everything perceived—has to fall into some classification suffixed —core. Everything has to give a particular vibe to be understood or appreciated. Literature has sadly not escaped this trend; communities such as BookTok have popularized a variety of literary aesthetics, including the prominent Dark Academia, Light Academia, and Cottagecore. I looked up what other ones exist and I admit to staring with beffudlement at whatever is supposed to be Coastal Grandma literature.
I understand the desire to be seen in a particular light. But if you’ve lowered the number of books in your reading challenge only to force yourself to read works that classify as a certain aesthetic, causing yourself to miss out on those that actually align with your literary interests, then your reading is performative.
It’s also performative if you take a book with you out in public just to be seen with it. And so is it if you claim to have read something you haven’t.
Which means Bayard’s instruction on knowing how to talk about books you haven’t read is an instruction on performative reading.
What I failed to understand at first, though, is that performative reading, when used for a specific purpose, can be a positive thing—and knowing how to do it correctly is essential.
When, why, and how to perform with your reading
“Reading is first and foremost non-reading. Even in the case of the most passionate lifelong readers, the act of picking up and opening a book masks the countergesture that occurs at the same time: the involuntary act of not picking up and not opening all the other books in the universe.”
Because reading every book is impossible and forgetting details about books you have indeed read is expected, Bayard claims it is likely you will someday find yourself caught up in a conversation about works you have minimal knowledge or recollection of. If such a conversation takes place in an academic or professional (sometimes even casual) setting, where the expectation is that you’d be familiar with a particular work of literature, knowing how to participate effectively becomes necessary.
In other words—knowing this skill is essential in scenarios where the pressure to engage in literature-themed conversations exceeds the time (or interest) you realistically have to read the books in question.
With that said, Bayard’s guide presupposes that you accept these two conditions to succeed:
Books are a system. Instead of focusing on each book as something individual, you ought to see it as part of something bigger—a system—and understand its value and content based on its position within that system and in relation to other books. The focus should be on totality, on exhaustiveness, not on the accumulation of isolated bits of knowledge.
Knowledge (of books) is a spectrum. What this means is that you don’t have to read a book to know it. You can skim parts of it. You can read a summary. Understand the book’s general place in culture. You can collect bits of information from what you’ve heard about this book in interviews, pop culture, reviews, and in conversation.
Once you accept these two conditions, the steps to take for effectively talking about a book you haven’t read include:
1- Admitting to not having read the book. Do not claim to have deep familiarity with the content (because you don’t). Instead, saying things like “I have an idea about it” can establish the fact that you’re not totally ignorant about the topic and that your contributions have some weight, and if you are to make a mistake while discussing it, you can be excused for it.
2- Relying on your collective knowledge i.e. the spectrum mentioned earlier. Use what you’ve indirectly absorbed about the book to frame your comments. You may choose to focus on the book’s broader themes—such as its historical value, its cultural significance, its relationship to other books published around the same time (and which you may have read), instead of trying to show people you know the details of a plot you haven’t read.
3- Shifting the conversation when it’s not in your favor. You ought to remember that you’re not on a trivia show—the focus is on the dialogue you’re having, not how much you know. Bring the focus back to your thoughts or related works you have read so that you can further contribute to the discussion.
Bayard gives an example from his own experience to show us how it’s done:
“For instance, I've never "read" Joyce's Ulysses, and it's quite plausible that I never will. The "content" of the book is thus largely foreign to me—its content, but not its location. Of course, the content of a book is in large part its location. This means that I feel perfectly comfortable when Ulysses comes up in conversation, because I can situate it with relative precision in relation to other books. I know, for example, that it is a retelling of the Odyssey, that its narration takes the form of a stream of consciousness, that its action unfolds in Dublin in the course of a single day, etc. And as a result, I often find myself alluding to Joyce without the slightest anxiety.”
This kind of performative reading would be shallow and superficial if it’s done for the purpose of impressing others or giving a particular aesthetic impression of yourself. But, as we can see, Bayard’s recommendation is to do it for the sake of true and creative cultural engagement and meaningful social interaction (and, sometimes, for survival in intellectual spaces).
Now—have I read Bayard’s How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read? No, and it’s quite plausible that I never will. The “content” of the book is thus largely foreign to me—its content, but not its location. Of course, the content of a book is in large part its location. This means I feel perfectly comfortable when How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read comes up in conversation, because I can situate it with relative precision in relation to other books. I know, for example, that it champions the art of bluffing, that it redefines what it means to read a book, and that it offers some solace to generations of academics and professionals who might find themselves in unexpected discussions they do not want to be entirely left out of. And, as a result, I often find myself alluding to Bayard without the slightest anxiety—sometimes even with a book I haven’t yet opened, looking very thoughtful.
See what I did there?
To write up this post for you, I read the three-page excerpt, a summary online, and looked up a few important quotes to make my article seem more authentic. That’s all I had to do to know the book, no matter how partially.
And you can do the same with any work. This is why performative reading doesn’t always have to be something to look down on.
Until next time,
Heba x
P.S. you can access the three-page excerpt on here.
What are your thoughts on performative reading?
If you’ve enjoyed this article, subscribe to receive more similar content!
Thank you for articulating the shared feeling we readers experience regarding our inability to read as many books as we would like in one lifetime, Hiba.
But then, the question becomes: "How do we decide what books to read?"
I really loved the concept of knowing the book's location in the broader corpus of its period. To elaborate, perhaps knowing the book's degree of influence on other books—akin to the number of citations a scholarly article receives—would allows us to choose it when exploring a new topic and to rank-order our reading list accordingly.
Likewise, audiobooks can allow us to "read"—or at least perfomatively read with substantial depth—more books, as we can do so while engaging in other activities.
I don't even know what I just read (this piece)