Summer Reading

In New York, a group called The Outdoor Co-ed Topless Pulp Fiction Appreciation Society did exactly what their name advertised: they sat in parks reading serious books without shirts. Their motto was Making Reading Sexy, which was either sincere or ironic or both, and it didn’t really matter which.

The actual appeal is straightforward. Sensuality and intellect in one moment, without the usual distance between them. But what struck me was that they seemed to reach for the same books every time—the canonical stuff, the classics everyone pretends to have read. Which means either they had convictions about what real reading looks like, or they were all enacting the same fantasy of being a certain person: educated, unselfconscious, willing to be strange in public.

Probably both. When you commit fully to something absurd, it stops being ironic and just becomes true.

I never saw them in person, just in photos. The women looked comfortable in a way that made it work. You can’t perform something that weird and sexual and intellectual at once. You have to let it be genuine.