Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it. –P.J. O’Rourke

This year, my mom gave me a book cover made from fabric for one of my birthday presents. It said “travel-reading” (or something along those lines) on the front; it felt nice and squishy compared to the average binding and was generally a nice way to accessorise the book I had asked for in the first place.

Come to think about it, I couldn’t help but associate travel-reading with

a)    reading mind-numbing trash (because who can be bothered with Foucault when frying in the sun?); or

b)    reading something without being judged by others. 

Chances are that travel will lead you some place where nobody speaks your language, so might as well whip out anything your heart desires. And with the squishy book cover, nobody will ever know what lies beyond the purple fabric anyway.

People always say to not judge a book by its cover. However, we usually aremore than happy to judge our fellow human beings by the cover of the book they’re reading. Self-help book? – Wow, they must have ISSUES. Poetry? – Must be a daydreamer. Cheesy romantic novel? – Desperate housewife for sure. Consequently, anytime I visit someone’s house or room for the first time, my eyes inevitably roam the bookshelves –you are what you read, right?

Late last year, Japan’s literary scene was put in a flurry. A list of books borrowed from a High School library by Haruki Murakami, award-winning and best-selling author in Japan and internationally, had been published.[1] While the newspaper that published the list argued that information on literary celebrity Murakami’s reading were clearly in the interest of the general public, others countered that people should never have to fear that their reading habits will be publicized.

In Murakami’s case, one of the more “sexually frank” titles included Joseph Kessel’s Belle de Jour, a tale of a housewife gone prostitute. Clearly, Murakami would be judged for his reading. To make things worse, his teenage reading. The squishy cover of privacy was removed from all the books he had read, or even just borrowed, decades ago.

Embarrassing, right? Well, I don’t think so. I believe that what we read, particularly while growing up, can change and influence us. It could turn us into better people – it could, however, also not change us in the slightest. Who can claim to have read every book he or she ever started cover to cover? Sometimes we give up on books, we learn that we don’t like them, that we disagree with their message or style.

With Murakami, nobody knows whether or not he even read Belle de Jour. He might as well have used it as a door stopper for 4 weeks and returned it, unread and unchanged.

Of course privacy in general is something that we give up, sometimes deliberately and sometimes without even noticing, on a day-to-day basis. In times of “anti-terror-surveillance”, who is to say that your private reading list is not suddenly in the public interest? With the Patriot Act in place, for example, borrowing a Quran and standard works on chemistry from a US library might already put an end to your private reading.

With the squishy book-cover, however, you can at least be sure to keep the person sitting opposite you on the train in the dark about you re-reading 50 Shades of Grey for the 49^th time.

How would you feel if your life’s library records were on display for everyone to see?

Have you ever felt judged for a book you read?

[1] http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-haruki-murakami-library-books-20151202-story.html