Are you an actual book nerd, or are you just 'performative reading'?

Before Sebastian Castillo cracks open a book on the bus, he has an intrusive thought: Should he tap the stranger next to him on the shoulder and clarify that yes, he’s starting this book on Page 1, but he has, in fact, read many other books before

Before Sebastian Castillo cracks open a book on the bus, he has an intrusive thought: Should he tap the stranger next to him on the shoulder and clarify that yes, he’s starting this book on Page 1, but he has, in fact, read many other books before?

Castillo, a novelist and English literature instructor, said he realizes that is extreme. He'd never do that. But the urge reflects a recent anxiety that has burgeoned around the act of reading in public in the digital age, when everything is scrutinized as possibly “performative.”

“If you’re on the bus or at the park or at a cafe, nobody really cares about you or what you’re doing,” said Castillo, 37. “And so I think it’s, more than anything, just kind of a silly way to think about how people tend to observe themselves more than how other people observe them.”

It's a feeling that many people have started to put into words.

On social media, real and staged videos of people reading at coffee shops, on escalators or at basketball games have become fodder for jokes about "performative reading," or the idea that people want to look like they’re reading without actually doing so. Some have playfully shared their own lists of books they deem suitable to “read performatively” on public transit. The singer Sombr even poked fun at the concept in the middle of a concert this year.