Is it OK to read Infinite Jest in public? Why the internet hates ‘performative reading'

The Guardian

30-06-2025

I consider no activity more luxurious than posting up at a bar solo with a good book. The creasing of a paperback in one hand, the weight of a wine glass in the other, the feeling of being alone in a crowd of people all make for a lovely evening. Or at least, I thought so, until recently, when two twentysomethings approached me during this ritual. 'Are you reading alone?' one asked. 'I could neverrrr,' the other said, and then uttered the universal mean girl slight: 'I wish I had your confidence.'
Reading in public – not cool. Or at least 'performative reading', as it's been dubbed on social media, is worthy of ridicule.
Not long ago, during the peak years of corny millennial humor, we celebrated @HotDudesReading, an Instagram account-turned-book that showed attractive men toting books on trains and park benches. Now, god forbid anyone (hot dudes included) enjoy a moment of escapism during the capitalist grind, or else they might end up in someone's mocking post. To quote the caption of one popular meme depicting an anonymous train passenger reading a Brit lit classic: 'Poser art himbo on the subway barely 10 pages into his performative copy of Frankenstein.'
It's called performative reading not just because someone might be pretending to read, but rather that they want everyone to know they read. The presumption is that they're performing for passersby, signaling they have the taste and attention span to pick up a physical book instead of putting in AirPods. And we're not talking about Colleen Hoover's latest or a romantasy title; the books that qualify are capital 'L' literature: Faulkner, Nabokov, Franzen. The heavier the better.
Of course, it requires a deeply broken brain to be this bothered by a stranger's summer reading list. Chalk this obsession with performative reading up to a wariness of personal branding. We can't even indulge in an innocent hobby without it being considered some sort of aesthetic curation.
Last month, Hailey Bieber poked fun at her vapid image in a Vogue TikTok, in which she pulled out The Portable Nietzsche ('I love this one, probably my fourth or fifth time reading it, so good') and Kant's Critique of Pure Reason ('been taking a lot of notes from this one'). The hosts of the Run-Through, Vogue's official podcast, later called the post 'satire'. Another win for the books-as-props community.
Ten years ago, John Waters's famous quote about how if you go home with someone and they don't have books, 'don't fuck 'em' came printed on tote bags. Now, is the prevailing wisdom that anyone who dares read the newborn-sized Infinite Jest during their lunch break an absolute loser? I decided to find out in my own personal mini-odyssey.
The performative reading canon spans many titles and genres, and I thought about using Robert Caro's The Power Broker, Moby Dick or The Bell Jar in this experiment. Ultimately, I chose Infinite Jest, because it clocks in at over just 1,000 pages, I've never met a person who had finished it, and at many times I've considered picking it up but reconsidered simply because I did not want to be the dude on the subway reading Infinite Jest. I found a $9 copy at my neighborhood bookstore in Brooklyn and braced myself for what I was sure would be abject humiliation courtesy of the gen Z cashier. Instead, she asked if I needed a bag.
'I think so – it's kind of heavy,' I said, propping it on my hip dramatically as if it were a small child. She nodded for the person behind me in line to step forward with the apathy of someone who's not being paid enough for this.
On the train, I held the behemoth in front of my face, angling so the woman with groceries across from me could not help but notice that I was Better Than Her. As I peeked over the page, I tried to clock any annoyance. But, tragically, she had things to worry about other than my reading list.
When I got to Washington Square Park, the unofficial campus center of New York University and general young person shenanigans hub, I awaited to be caught in the act, secretly filmed for a TikTok ridiculing my performance. Again, no one cared – except for a gen X man who sat on the park bench next to me, exactly the type of guy who might consider David Foster Wallace a modern-day saint. He politely asked how I was doing with the book. I told him I was 20 pages in and hadn't quite hit footnote hell yet. He said to keep going and suggested that I literally cut the book into thirds to make it more manageable. (Apparently this is common knowledge among Wallace support groups that have popped up through the years.)
After I thanked him and went back to reading, a crazy thing happened: I enjoyed myself. One of life's simplest pleasures is falling into a story and tuning the world out. But to get there, you have to stop worrying about what someone's going to think of you – or whether you'll unwittingly end up in a bitchy TikTok. And as far as I know, I didn't.
All the finger-wagging about performative reading begs the question: where are we supposed to read the classics? Can it only be done at home, like a secret bad habit? For people who take public transit, especially trains with spotty wifi, commuting can be the only time when we have an hour or so to totally focus on a book (and on not missing our stop). So the next time you see one of us reading at a bar, coffee shop or the park, please leave us alone. This is not for you; we're just enjoying the vibes.
It's a scary time to be someone who cherishes the written word. The country is in the midst of a literary crisis. We're told by college professors that students can't read entire books anymore, that gen Z parents don't like reading to their kids, that smartphones ruined our ability to focus on anything longer than 30 seconds, that AI slop will take over publishing. Don't be a chump. Read everywhere, and read often.
And maybe there's still some steeze that comes from flexing an 'important' book. When I posted on Instagram about reading Infinite Jest in public, a friend told me she once went to a 'nudist' spa in Portland where she encountered a guy reading the book in a jacuzzi. 'He had the biggest penis I've ever seen in my life,' she wrote. 'It wasn't a performance, it was promotion.'