READING IS FUNDAMENTAL
Also just plain fun.
Despite their reputation as being terminally online, Gen Z are big readers of romance and fantasy. Those genres aren’t my cup of tea, but I’m delighted to know that the youth are literate.
Books are very popular with the older generations as well, but sometimes for different reasons. You can buy books to decorate your home and pay by the foot. Websites like Wayfair will sell you color-coordinated cloth-bound books for $120 a foot. Bookstores like the Strand and the Argosy in New York City will do the same. For leather-bound books in good condition the price can reach $1000 a foot. Leather books require some maintenance to keep them in good condition, but if you’re paying tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to make it look like you’re well read, I imagine you can afford to hire someone to carefully anoint your unread volumes with Neatsfoot oil.
If that’s a little rich for your blood–it is for mine, I buy used books for a dollar apiece at the Strand–there are other options. You can buy fake bookshelves with the spines of real books glued to them, or a kind of banner or tapestry of shelves full of books.
There’s also the option of buying cardboard replica coffee table books. Shein, the cut-price fast-fashion website, sells evocative titles like “Chic,” “Our Home,” and “Thankful.” Shein does sell actual books, but searching for “books” shows you the fake ones; for real ones you have to search “books to read.” You can also buy fake books from Amazon; after destroying the publishing industry, they’re cheerfully selling you a simulation.
I think it’s fascinating that people who buy these things don’t even care that these “books” are demonstrably fake, they just want to be associated with literacy. As the title of the Anthony Powell novel remarks, “Books Do Furnish a Room.”
At least Jay Gatsby bought real books to populate the shelves of his mansion in West Egg, though he hadn’t read them. In days of yore, books were bound in such a way that every two pages had to be cut apart at the edge with a knife or letter opener. The uncut pages also served as a marker of where you’d gotten to when reading a book for the first time. A drunken, “owl-eyed” guest at one of Gatsby’s parties astutely noted that none of the pages of Gatsby’s books had been cut. I like Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s assessment of this phenomenon: “Let’s call this collection of unread books an Anti-Library.”
I will give Shein a tiny bit of credit though. Because their Gen Z customers are reading more, they have decided to partner with the fantastic used book site Alibris to sell more tomes to the young folk. I imagine they will do a brisk trade in dog-eared copies of Marcus Aurelius’s “Meditations.”
There’s currently a trend of mocking “performative reading”--that is, anyone reading in public. The idea is that they’re only holding the book to show off. I think that’s silly. First of all, how does anyone know these folks aren’t really reading? Second, if you’re really willing to hold a copy of Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics” and stare at it in public instead of thumbing through social media on your phone because you think it makes you look smart, it still shows respect for books.
During the Covid pandemic, when the entire world moved onto Zoom, people bought books to fill the shelves behind them during online meetings. Whenever I watch a podcast on YouTube, I try to decipher the titles of any visible books. The books on your shelves, on your coffee table, your tote bags from bookstores, these are all identity props. Like all props they convey your intellects, tastes, and aspirations. A bookshelf could be a self portrait, a facade, or a mood board.
People choose books based on who they want to become. We read philosophy in crisis, travel books before we go on an adventure. I have a friend who wanted to organize her house, so she bought books about organizing.
I recently learned about someone who keeps his 20 favorite books on a shelf in the living room. Every now and then he swaps out a couple to reflect his current most beloved tomes. He’s sketching a portrait of his interior life with books.
You can read books that challenge you, or books that entertain you. You can read books that inform you or scare you. I would love for you to read philosophy, but mostly I would just love for you to read. You’re doing it now! As Epictetus said, “If you want to be a reader, read.”
Look around you, what books do you see and what do they say about you?
Love this. I both envy and distrust people who have their books sorted by color on their shelves.
This made me laugh and think at the same time. Anti libraries, real books, leather-bound books… they all reveal who we are and for some, who we’re working towards to become.
Even fake books say something honest: in one way or another, we all want to be associated with wisdom.
I absolutely love this piece! It was a fun read. 🙏