Book of Daze: Pretend You Read Classic Literature
Once a year, the nation celebrates the noble art of literary bluffing. On Pretend You Read Classic Literature Day, ordinary citizens dust off the unread tomes that have been gathering dust since college and carry them into public like fashion accessories for the soul. Nothing says “cultured” like holding War and Peace with the same vacant pride once reserved for a Starbucks Frappuccino. The secret is to open it randomly, furrow your brow, and sigh as if the battle of Borodino just wronged you personally .
Pretending to have read the classics is an ancient tradition, stretching back to when scholars pretended to understand Aristotle and monks pretended to have seen a Bible. Modern practitioners favor props–oversized novels, annotated copies of Ulysses, dog-eared Infinite Jest paperbacks that could stun a charging rhino. Bonus points if you mispronounce “Proust” as “spruce” or “Dostoevsky” as “Dos Equis.” Triple points if you refer to Moby-Dick as “a meditation on modern loneliness.”
A real book is crucial to this charade because a real book broadcasts virtue in a way a cell phone never can. A phone says you are scrolling doom or liking cat videos; a book says you are wrestling with ideas. When you stare at a phone, no one assumes you are reading Proust–they assume you are checking your ex’s Instagram. But cradle a nine-hundred-page novel, and suddenly you are mysterious, brooding, perhaps even profound. A book is the last socially acceptable prop for pretending to have a soul.
Participation on Pretend You Read Classic Literature requires no reading, only posture. Hold the book close to your chest as if it contains the wisdom of the ages–or a boarding pass you hope no one checks. When someone asks your favorite part, answer, “The language.” If they persist, glance toward the horizon and whisper, “It’s the human condition.”
At sundown, the nation returns its borrowed gravitas to the shelves, slips into sweatpants, and streams a show about zombies with subtitles off. Having successfully honored Pretend You Read Classic Literature Day, you can go to bed secure in the knowledge that Tolstoy, Proust, and the entire Western canon remain safe from your attention.
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