Written by Deniz Kaya

All the internet girls read like it’s a fashion statement. Almost all of my friends bring a book with them wherever we go. How many of us carry books with us? How many of us read them on public transportation? Do we all secretly want the title of being a reader? What is so attractive about a reader?  

What makes a reader sexy isn’t the ability to read but something more magnetic and subtle. It hints at the layers of a person. Taste in books creates mystery, a doorway into a person’s mind that gives you an idea as to what they enjoy and how they think. There is an intimacy that’s left unspoken when you see a familiar cover on the subway that you just added to your ‘to be read’ list. You want to ask, but any comment would be a way of flirting. It makes you wonder if that book is the only common thing you have. 

This eagerness to share about what we are reading is why we have seen many book clubs emerge in the past year. From singers to writers, lovers to friends, everyone seems to be eager to talk about what they are reading. All the effortless, cool girls of social media sneak a book with a witty title and a clever cover into their posts and stories. But we only see the cover posted and nothing mentioned about what’s inside; is it time to judge the book by its cover? 

To be fair, book covers have stepped up. Gone are the boring, conventional covers where the title is just slapped on the white page, replaced with unexpected, harmonic covers that can actually match your tote bag and outfit of the day. Cleopatra and Frankenstein by Coco Mellors and every new edition of Joan Didion has been all over social media.  The cover may have been the problem all along, it just needed to be coherent with one’s style of expression. 

My feed has been filled with ‘performative reading’, where the book becomes the accessory, to create an image. Boyfriends of the internet carrying books in their back pocket, celebrities being photographed with their book of the month that they picked up at the airport. Was it ever real? Can Jacob Elordi be reading Jean Cocteau at the beach? I am not the one to judge that but I do believe there is a performance when it comes to posting anything on social media. We curate ourselves by picking and choosing what fits into the algorithm. Social media is not casual anymore nor are the books we read. 

That’s why I carefully curated a library to match my persona and aesthetic. I read Dolly Alderton’s Everything I Know About Love because I am a girl in my twenties, experiencing love and friendship in college, and I have read The Bell Jar as if it’s the only feminist literature I know of. 

I feel inferior for all the books I haven’t picked up yet. In spite of that, there is a sense of comfort since I frolicked around with my books in hand that I deliberately picked to belong. This is a confession. I am not proud. 

However, I believe this need for performance has discreetly changed the attitude of our generation towards books. Everyone is trying to keep up with the top ten on Goodreads. In the midst of all this, the books that we keep seeing on social media have made us readers again. In one way or another, we curate our own taste in books and don’t look back. 

So, yes, reading is sexy again and I enjoy seeing people showing off what they are reading. Truth be told, quoting a book in a social setting has never been out of style. We just had to package it into being cool.