Alice-Azania Jarvis: Obama might get away with book bragging — but the rest of us should think before we boast

What are you currently reading? This newspaper, obviously — but books-wise? What’s on your bedside table? A little Tolstoy, perhaps? A bit of James Joyce? The collected works of Thomas Hardy? Whatever, your literary diet will almost certainly provide slim pickings in comparison to Will Self’s bulging banquet.

Last week the author claimed to be reading as many as 50 books at once, “if you mean, by ‘currently reading’, books I’ve begun, left off, and returned to”. The result, he added, was that he was “reading everything from Michel Houellebecq’s Submission to Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals and back again via Mary Beard’s polemical Women & Power.”

It wasn’t long before the Self-mockery started. Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon tweeted that “reading 50 books at the same time isn’t really reading any of them at all”. Even Self’s ex-wife, the journalist Deborah Orr, chimed in, quipping: “I read as many as 50 tweets at once,” while historian Dr Fern Riddell added: “Give the story your full attention OMG.”

Still, if his answer struck a bum note I have some sympathy. After all, is there any question quite so bamboozling as “What are you reading?” Asked it at a party recently I found myself goldfish-mouthed, torn between the truth (a steamy romance in paperback form plus a self-help title on Audible) or claiming to be 20 lessons into an advance copy of Noah Yuval Harari’s 21 Lessons for the 21st Century.

And if Self is guilty of literary hubris, he is hardly alone. From celebrity blogs and book clubs (Bill Gates’s Gates Notes; Emma Watson’s Our Shared Shelf) to the publication on Sunday of the second instalment of Barack Obama’s summer reading list (think V S.Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas and late Swedish physician Hans Rosling’s Factfulness), we’re all at it. My Instagram feed is awash with details of the piles of books friends are squeezing into their suitcases. Present in abundance: the entire Booker longlist . Missing in action: anything you’d want to look at while horizontal on a sun lounger.

Forget virtue signalling — book bragging is the modern means of collecting kudos. I am as guilty as anyone. Having moved from a shoebox into a two-bedroom flat with actual shelves, I recently set about buying all the classics that I’d never read but wanted to be able to say I had: William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Anna Karenina and — dare I admit it? — almost the entire ouevre of Charles Dickens.

But why? In almost every other arena — food, TV, music — we’re happy to tout our populist credentials, tucking into Nando’s while watching Love Island. Yet when it comes to books we appear to be suffering a collective inferiority complex.

Perhaps it’s time to rebel — take pride in the Dan Browns hidden on the bottom shelf, the Marian Keyes buried in the bedroom. Though if you’re wondering, I’m currently reading everything from Plato’s Republic to Darwin’s On the Origin of Species via Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Of course.

Why I’m in love with Keanu and Winona

Zooming to the top of my list of Things Which Probably Aren’t True But I Really, Really Wish They Were: reports that Winona Ryder and Keanu Reeves might actually be husband and wife . Judging by the reaction to Ryder’s claim that their marriage in the Francis Ford Coppola-directed Dracula was officiated by a real priest, I am not alone.

Irrespective of the fact that a priest pretending to officiate, with no documents signed, is not the same thing as a bona fide wedding, the internet exploded with joy at the news. Or those of us born between 1975 and 1990 did, while everyone else wondered why we cared so much about the lady from Stranger Things and the guy from The Matrix. So it’s almost certainly just a way to drum up publicity for their new film Destination Wedding — but there’s enough bad news out there, so let’s enjoy it, shall we?

Culture Secretary Jeremy Wright’s plan to give his Tory Party conference speech in the form of a hologram is billed as a way to make the event “less dreary”. Though given that last year’s most arresting spectacle was the sight of letters falling from a magnetic wall, this isn’t necessarily saying much.

Still, I’m intrigued, so perfect does Wright’s plan seem for the 75 per cent of the population who fear public speaking. Might we see the day when nervous best men toast a groom via hologram? Wright will follow in celebrated footsteps — Kate Moss and Tupac Shakur have made holographic appearances, the former as part of Alexander McQueen’s 2006 Widows of Culloden show in Paris, the latter in a 2012 posthumous appearance at Coachella.