This could be from any age really. I remember reading lots of books like Harry Potter as a 4th grader to seem smart to the teachers looking at me but I didn’t understand any of it. When the big YA dystopian boom was happening, I read tons of terrible YA dystopias to seem cool but many of them frustrated me.
Not to seem smart, but to try and fit in with my friends: I attempted a lot of Vonnegut that I didn’t get or enjoy because my friends liked him a lot. And he’s great, just not my style. I tried to read a lot of Heinlein because my best friend was super into old sci fi - I was only able to finish Stranger in a Strange Land, but only because I powered through the last quarter of the book. I couldn’t finish the Moon is a Harsh Mistress, The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, and others I don’t remember the titles of. We were also into David Bowie at the time, and he was in a movie adaptation of The Man Who Fell to Earth by Walter Tevis (who also authored The Queen’s Gambit). So I bought a copy of that (it might have been out of print at the time; I found it on ebay or something), and it wasn’t my style, and I didn’t really enjoy it, but I read it.
Actually my style IS all of the books people complain that people read just to look smart - I legitimately enjoy those and actually get accused of being pretentious or, worse, of being insecure about my intelligence. It’s not true, I just like realism, even (especially?) when it occasionally borders on the mundane.