You can learn a surprising amount about a person from the book protruding from their tote bag. Not because they’ve read it. Because they’ve chosen to be seen with it. A novel is no longer just a novel. It’s a wearable personality trait. Somewhere between a watch and a political opinion, the modern book has become an accessory that says, “This is who I am,” or, more accurately, “This is who I would like strangers to think I am.”

Take a stroll through any fashionable café, and you’ll witness an entire ecosystem of literary peacocking. The person is reading a Russian classic the size of a paving stone. They are either a genius or on page twelve. There is no middle ground. 

Nearby sits someone with a copy of a philosopher whose name contains at least three umlauts. They have strategically placed the book beside an oat milk flat white. The book is face up. The difficult bits are face down. And then there’s the person carrying an intimidating work of nonfiction about geopolitics, behavioural economics, or the collapse of civilisation. They may never read it, but they want you to know that they could.

This is not a new phenomenon. Humans have always used cultural objects as social signals. In the nineteenth century, people displayed grand libraries. In the twentieth century, they displayed record collections. Today, we display books in the wild, like intellectual emotional-support animals.

The difference is that the audience has expanded dramatically. Once upon a time, your unread books sat quietly on a shelf where only house guests could judge you. Now they can be photographed, posted, tagged, and algorithmically distributed to hundreds of people before you’ve reached chapter one.

The humble act of reading has acquired a publicity department. A book now performs two jobs. The first is obvious. It contains ideas, stories, arguments, and information. The second is less obvious. It serves as a tiny billboard announcing your values, interests, and aspirations.

In this respect, books have become remarkably efficient. A single cover can communicate: “I am intellectually curious.” A different cover can communicate: “I have feelings.” A third can communicate: “I own a tote bag.” Entire identities can now be constructed from carefully selected rectangles of paper.

This is why people are often more committed to carrying books than finishing them. Finishing a book is private. Carrying a book is public. One activity generates knowledge. The other generates a vibe. Guess which one modern culture rewards more enthusiastically.

Social media has transformed culture consumption into a spectator sport. We don’t just watch films, we announce them. We don’t just listen to music, we share screenshots of it. We don’t simply read books, we stage-manage them. A novel placed casually beside sunglasses on a beach towel is never actually casual.

Nothing in human history has been less accidental than a book positioned next to a croissant. The message is clear: I am not merely eating breakfast. I am nourishing my mind. The irony, of course, is that books are uniquely vulnerable to this kind of performance because they are so universally respected. Nobody carries a tax spreadsheet around to seem interesting. Nobody carefully arranges a user manual beside a cappuccino.

Books possess a cultural prestige that far exceeds that of most other objects. Even people who rarely read continue to regard reading as something admirable. We may not always do it, but we like the idea of being the kind of person who does. And that distinction is important. Because beneath all the performance lies something surprisingly hopeful. The unread book is often treated as evidence of hypocrisy. But more often, it is evidence of aspiration.

The stack of books on your bedside table isn’t a record of failure. It’s a record of ambition wildly exceeding available time. Most readers don’t buy books because they have finished all the books they own. They buy books because they are optimistic. They genuinely believe that Future Me will somehow become a different person.

Yet something is charming about this endless optimism. People continue acquiring books because they continue believing in the possibility of becoming slightly smarter, wiser, or more interesting than they are today. That’s not vanity. That’s hope. In fact, performative reading culture accidentally reveals something rather encouraging about society.

For all our complaints about social media, attention spans, and digital distraction, books remain aspirational objects. People still want to be associated with ideas. They still want to look thoughtful. They still believe intelligence is worth signalling. There are certainly worse collective delusions.

The more interesting question is what happens when the performance leads to participation. Because sometimes the book bought for appearances gets opened. The novel purchased because everyone was talking about it ends up becoming a favourite. The intimidating history book turns out to be fascinating. The prop unexpectedly becomes an experience. This is the quiet miracle that books still perform.

You may carry a book to signal intelligence. Then the book inconveniently makes you more intelligent. You may buy it for the aesthetic. Then you accidentally read it. And that’s why books continue to occupy a peculiar place in modern culture.

The book you carry may indeed say more about you than the book you read. It reveals your aspirations, your ambitions, your preferred version of yourself. But the book you read gets the final word. One is a performance. The other is a transformation. And thankfully, books remain among the few props that occasionally refuse to stay props.

With Love, Chaos, and Jazz. Always.