Forget the latest It bag—nowadays, celebrities are carrying a different status symbol: books. With the recent proliferation of celebrity memoirs, celebrity book clubs, and celebrity memoir book clubs, there’s never been a better time to be literate.
It makes sense, after all: Books carry a social and intellectual cachet. What people read (or, at the very least, appear to be reading) conveys far more than a regular paparazzi shot. Sarah Jessica Parker has turned the set of And Just Like That… into a library. Wearing her costume—a cloud of fuchsia tulle—the actor was spotted toting Patriot, the memoir from the late Russian opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, who died in a Siberian prison earlier this year.
Parker isn’t the only one putting their intellect front and center. Recently, Jacob Elordi proved himself a true cinephile, thumbing through Jean Cocteau’s The Art of Cinema while on holiday in Sardinia. With her heavily annotated books of essays, meanwhile, Kendall Jenner regularly reminds us that she’s far more than just a pretty face.
With that, we ask: Are celebrities actually, genuinely poring over the books they tote around? And does it matter? Where a few of the more voracious readers are surely lurking on secret Goodreads accounts, others may well treat the latest buzzy novel a bit like a trendy accessory. But who’s to say—or to judge!
Here, a survey of the ever-growing list of books that the paparazzi have captured in the arms of celebrities recently. Happy browsing—and reading!
Sarah Jessica Parker
Another famous book-lover (she even has her own imprint!), Parker regularly kills time between scenes on the set of And Just Like That by reading. Most recently, she was spotted carrying Patriot, the 496-page posthumous memoir by Alexei Navalny—the Russian dissident and outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin—who died under mysterious circumstances in an Arctic prison earlier this year.
