Performative Reading: Let's Do This

I need to know what books are going around, it's important

[photo by _notesandnovels]

I happen to know that Ocean Vuong has a new book out and chances are so do you*.

It’s called The Emperor of Gladness and everything about it is breathless and that is fitting because Vuong does breathlessness like few others. They are very good at it and people are ready for it. Everybody, it seems, has been waiting for the new book to arrive, and now that it’s here everybody wants you to know that they’ve got a copy which is obviously fine.

I do not have a copy of TEoG, nor do I have a physical copy of Vuong’s previous novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, though I was working as a bookseller at Pulp Fiction Books when OEWBG was released and can assure you that people devoured it like forbidden wafers when the officious ones were looking away.

I experienced OEWBG in a non-photographical format - the audiobook. Read by the author. Those sentences and rhythms in Ocean Vuong’s voice is an excellent way to experience that narrative.

But there’s no charm in sharing a screencapped jpeg of a squared cover image from Audible.com even with a photoshopped mug of fresh coffee in the top corner for balance. We need the book itself. We need to see the foxing on that second-hand score. We need to sense the tactility of the deckled edge on that first-run trade paperback that was shortlisted for a local literary prize.

Let’s not forget that many of us are following a lot of cool publishers and cover designers across the channels for various reasons and they’re always sharing new covers and designs that provoke curiosity about books and writers.

Here’s one that I just saw on my feed this morning. I know nothing about this book or the author but the vibes are strong.

[image: Salamander Hill Design]

The Guardian entered the chat today with an article by Alaina Demopoulos titled, Is It Ok to Read Infinite Jest in Public? Why the Internet Hates Performative Reading, and I agree that there’s a weird tension among book-people-of-the-internet about whether we should be excited about seeing books in public internet spaces, indifferent about this stuff entirely, or whether we should skip right to admonishment mode, a place of great comfort and familiarity.

I am in favour of books on the internet being shared for whatever reason.

I am extremely supportive of people reading their books with abandon in the meatspace reality that we all inhabit. At the cafe, on the bus, in the restaurant while you’re dining on a bowl of soup alone. Read something lewd at the beach or post to Instagram about your recent dalliance with contemporary translations from the Portuguese. Read something that you bought at the airport bookstore on the plane in full view of everyone waiting impatiently for their turn at the lav.

As someone with bookseller blood in their veins I am ready for your book content and I hope that you make it as performative as possible.

Though maybe let’s show a little discernment when we’re out at the spa.

From Demopoulos’ article in The Guardian,

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.”

* Always with the asterisks… but does this sharing of the books in the popular internet channels mean that we are taking the jobs away from the publicists and the marketing teams? No, it means that we are doing our job which is to make sure that people - our friends, our extended networks, strangers, and beyond - know what is going on and what the good stuff looks like.