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.
I don’t know if I ever actually read any of them, but as a teenager I definitely scavenged through op-shops for any of the impressive looking books bound with cloth or vinyl.