I’d Rather Be Seen With It Than Read It

Here’s a level of fashionable body positivity I can get get on board with.

I don’t know what this means though, “Some of these posts promote professional or political causes. Witherspoon, for instance, runs a production company and sometimes options books for vehicles she might star in.” I mean, I understand all the words individually, but joined together I am at sea.

This is more my speed, “Some bibliophiles take their ink-on-paper fetish a little too far online. ‘Ladies are draping their bodies across a swath of opened books like some sort of Abrahamic sacrifice to the gods of paper and ink,’ Hillary Kelly wrote in Vulture last year, identifying one of the more unsettling bookish fads to sweep Instagram.”

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I like the idea of accessorizing one’s costume with books, especially if you don’t have to worry much about anything else. Never mind about the shoes or the hat or the stockings or anything, just go find the book that suits you and lug it around all day, hoping to be noticed and plastered on instagram.

Of course that’s not what they mean. You have to worry about it all now, including the book part. And it doesn’t work if you’re reading on some kind of device. Then no one can tell and just thinks you’re surfing the Internet, which you probably are.

I did notice myself last year tempted to post lots of memes about how I am a ‘reading person.’ That’s the identity marker that best suits me. I want people to know that I like books and that I read them and everything, and so my finger was always hovering over the share button for bookish ven diagrams, I’d rather be reading quotes, and cartoons about how there is no such thing as too many books. Every time I did, though, a little tiny bitter voice in the center of my disquieted mind reminded me that it was a lie—‘there you are, scrolling through facebook, you’re not a reader, you just want to self-identify as one because it pushes back the gnawing anxiety of modern ennui.’ That’s what the voice literally said. So then I would pass on by, scrolling endlessly, not actually putting down the device and picking up a book.

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I like that it’s important in these latter days to be seen with the Right Book. Someone will see that I’m carrying around the latest thing and know that I’m the ‘right sort.’ I can indicate my virtue to you all day long online, but what of those terrible moments when I am ‘living life’?  How will you know that I have the right thoughts and feelings?

By the book I’m holding, of course!