I had hoped to avoid addressing the absurd notion of performative reading, but it won’t seem to go away. If the internet is to be believed, you can’t move on the 14A bus for men in purple corduroy reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.
Last month The New Yorker magazine officially acknowledged the phenomenon with an article headed “The Curious Notoriety of ‘Performative Reading’.” There is a pretty irony here. If one was compiling a list of magazines suited for this dubious activity, The New Yorker would surely land comfortably in the top five. The London Review of Books is too hard to identify from the end of the bus. A person reading Cahiers du Cinéma may just be French.
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