7. celebrities reading, hot girl edition
sure!
I’m maybe the last person to notice that celebrities — particularly trendy, mostly white models with instagram faces — have made reading cool again in recent years. Obviously, celebrities read. It’s not an activity reserved for ugly plebes. And yet, it still always fascinates us to see someone we associate with glamour and wealth casually holding a book. Like, does the book know what’s happening?
So it’s not a new phenomenon, especially considering Reese Witherspoon and Oprah have had their book clubs for ages, but with younger (and again, notably, white) Cool Girls like Emma Roberts and Kaia Gerber getting in the book club game, some celebs are making reading trendy. Or it could simply be that anything young hot people do feels trendy, no matter how ridiculous, ugly, or obvious it is! Either way, looking at what celebrities are reading is a perfect intersection of my biggest hobbies: deuxmoi spottings, the who? weekly podcast, and books.
We all want to speculate on whether celebrities are reading out of enjoyment or in an attempt to look deeper than they are. For models like Kaia Gerber and Emily Ratajkowski, whose careers depend on how attractive we find them, it may just be that they’re tired of being seen as dumb hot people and are using books to control public perception. Or maybe they just like reading, or find comfort in the distraction books give us — which is the reason most of us read.
And really, who cares? Us ugly, regular people perform our carefully curated personas online just as celebrities do, if not even more desperately. I have an entire instagram dedicated to what I’m reading, and no one even asked me the way they’re asking celebrities! We’re all doing performative shit, all day long. Even if all this celeb reading is purely performative, they’re at least influencing thousands of others to read and think critically — which is what literally everyone on bookstagram is trying to do.
Many still think of reading as morally superior, so perhaps when we scoff at celebrities and models reading, it’s really just a reflection of our own insecurities, our desire to be perceived as intelligent. But reading doesn’t belong to anyone, smart or stupid, pretty or ugly. A recent Gawker piece, which is admittedly very similar to this newsletter so I don’t have much room to talk, is obviously done in jest but captured the smugness a lot of regular people feel — if we can’t be both hot and smart, at least we can pretend that celebrities can’t be both hot and smart either.
And with all that being said, I’m now going to be hypocritical and judge a few select books that our gal pals here have read, despite having read very few of these books myself. Hopefully no one is going to sue me for this, but any of these women could gladly destroy me. I would love to unpack my undying love of celeb gossip in therapy, but I’m going to do it here instead.
Kendall Jenner has always come across as the quieter, refined, more awkward member of the Kardashian-Jenner brood (as awkward as a beautiful celebrity can be, but when KUWTK first came out, my awkward 16-year-old clown ass somehow thought she related most to Kendall), so if any of them were going to be seen with books, it was always going to be Kendall. She’s been reading Cool Girl Books for a while now, even being hailed as “the patron saint of alternative literature” by W magazine in 2019.
Pictured above is So Sad Today by Melissa Broder, presumably on a yacht, which is my dream reading location. I read this essay collection back in 2016, but Melissa Broder has stayed relevant in the literary scene since with her novels The Pisces and Milk Fed. The essays in So Sad Today are unsurprisingly about being sad, whether it’s because of anxiety or love or just the existential crisis that is being alive in the modern world. They’re feelings we sometimes forget celebrities are capable of because it’s safe to say that some of us would be happier, or at least things would be easier, if we looked like these models or had their money.
Another famous TMZ shot of Kendall reading, also on a yacht but this time of Tonight I’m Someone Else: Essays by Chelsea Hodson, caused sales to skyrocket and ultimate sell out. It’s an example of how celebrities reading can be used for good. Writing is rarely a lucrative profession, and if celebrities can use their influence to help out a few writers they admire, I’m all for it.
Other books Kendall has read (or claimed to!) include Literally Show Me a Healthy Person by Darcie Wilder, How to Cure a Ghost by Fariha Róisín, No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July, and Black Swans by Eve Babitz.
My biggest thing with her is that she seems to use books as props more than some of her competitors, as she isn’t doing much analysis or discussion of what she’s read. But she doesn’t have to! And while she could benefit from a little diversity in her choices, I don’t hate her taste and will be adding several of these to my TBR.
Emily Ratajkowski ascended to the highest tier of book bitches when she wrote her own, My Body. And while it’s received what I think is very valid criticism of her inability (or refusal) to turn the critical eye inward and examine her own role in society’s misogynistic expectations of women, the book has, overall, done well.
Because she can clearly write herself, I’m holding her book taste to a higher standard. She unfortunately did call Lena Dunham a “rec queen,” which is a red flag, but I do like her book taste.
There are some basic neutrals, like Sally Rooney’s novels. Several books she’s praised are ones I loved, like Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion by Jia Tolentino (a longtime fav writer of mine) and Luster by Raven Leilani, as well as some crowd favs I shamefully have yet to read, like Know My Name by Chanel Miller.
And in a Vogue Required Reading profile, EmRata gave five books that “changed her life,” one of which I’m really questioning (Madame Bovary, ma’am?), and my biggest takeaway is that she loves a book title with a colon:
Truth & Beauty: A Friendship by Ann Patchett
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
The Reckonings: Essays on Justice for the Twenty-First Century by Lacy M. Johnson
All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks
A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories by Lucia Berlin
In conclusion, EmRata’s taste skews heavily toward feminist works, but it seems like the general consensus is that based on her own writing, she might have only absorbed the tip of the iceberg. But it’s not fair to be overly critical, so regarding her book taste and book taste alone, she passes.
Kaia Gerber, well-known bookworm, is one of the Book Club Celebrities, starting hers in the pandemic probably for the same reason so many of us made bookstagrams — it’s nice to have a space to dump your thoughts while connecting with so many others. What sets hers apart to me, though, is the live instagram discussions she hosts with guests. Usually it’s the author, but during the first book club, for which she read Normal People by Sally Rooney, Kaia hosted with actor Daisy Edgar-Jones. There’s even been a Kaia/EmRata crossover, which is simply too much attractiveness and they need to calm down.
Kaia’s book club is another example of how celebrities are the ultimate influencers, holding an incredible amount of power in the book world. They have the ability to change an author’s life, and I have hopes that they’ll eventually use their influence to effect necessary change in the publishing industry, such as increased diversity — though the irony is not lost on me that it’s the white women with the power to make things less white.
As far as the actual books go, Kaia’s taste seems to be more varied. She ticks the required sad girlie book boxes, like Joan Didion and Sally Rooney, as well as the kind of books that Book Club Moms are just dying to tell you about, like Where the Crawdads Sing (which she literally discussed on instagram with her mom so lol). She also picked Trick Mirror (and had Jia on one of her instagram chats), so points again from me, and even more points for choosing Severance by Ling Ma, one of my favorites from 2018 that is actually about a pandemic. Recently she had Michelle Zauner on to talk about her memoir Crying in H Mart, which was a 2021 favorite and my eyes will still leak if I think about it too long.
And then there are some that don’t fit the mold of celeb-endorsed books, like Spring Awakening by Frank Wedekind and Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan. The variety gives me more of a reason to think that she is actually super into books and not just performing coolness through them. I feel like she could give me recommendations for books I haven’t heard of and would get me out of my comfort zone, which is actually the best kind of recommendation.
Emma Roberts also has a well-known book club, Belletrist, which she started with her friend Karah Preiss in 2017. Preiss has a quote in a New York Times story about celebrity book clubs that I think sums up this whole reading moment of the last few years: “We always kind of wanted to make reading and literary life feel as sexy and aspirational as fashion and beauty.”
I’ve long enjoyed the Belletrist picks, which most closely mirror my own reading tastes, if I’m being honest. They mostly go with new releases, which I assume is a strategic move considering they run their book club as a business more similar to the Reese or Oprah model than Kaia’s informal instagram discussions. Some of my favorites from their list:
My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite
Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson
Writers and Lovers by Lily King
The Lightness by Emily Temple
The Shimmering State by Meredith Westgate
Milk Fed by Melissa Broder
So nothing Emma Roberts is reading, at least for her book club, is particularly surprising. They’re all safe choices, popular for a reason, but there’s nothing wrong with safe and popular as long as you’re enjoying the books you’re reading :’)
However! Emma obviously reads outside of the Belletrist picks. Most notable is that she seems to be the leader of the Joan Didion fan club. This girl REALLY likes Joan. Not that I blame her.
Hailey Baldwin Bieber is not known for giving book recommendations, or even reading as far as I know, but she gets a mention here because she recently posted a picture with The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid, and the internet went wild. It’s also blowing up on BookTok right now (and maybe that’s where Hailey saw it), which confuses me because this book is kind of old and has already been popular. But there’s that celebrity influence at work! Here is my prediction that Hailey is going to be the next modelebrity giving casual book recommendations just by looking hot while reading them. Watch this space.
Sarah Jessica Parker stands out here as she isn’t a young, hot model, but Carrie Bradshaw was once just as iconic and SJP has been posting about her books for long enough that I wanted to include her. Her instagram feed is full of books she’s read, the captions quickly detailing her thoughts (I fucking love that she ends all her captions in “X, SJ” which is reminiscent of parents signing their texts like you don’t have their numbers saved with a mix of Gossip Girl). It’s clear to me that she’s an avid reader..
She reads some popular books that make all the lists, like Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen and Matrix by Lauren Groff, but a lot of the books she posts about have completely escaped my radar. Similar to Kaia’s reading, this actually makes me trust her more because she isn’t reading only trendy books someone else told her to (like I do lmao). I’m also obsessed with this paparazzi shot of her reading Beautiful World, Where Are You? by Sally Rooney on the set of And Just Like That. It’s the ultimate bookworm vibe — who amongst us did not bang into walls and/or people while walking around with our noses in a book as children?
This was so long and I apologize to your eyeballs if you made it this far. But tell me! If there are any celebrity reading habits you keep up with, I must know. I didn’t cover nearly as much as I could have, so I’ll be scouring the internet for a hopeful part two.
And in the meantime, I guess we’ll have to find another way to feel superior to stupidly hot, rich celebrities. Good luck!