How to Talk about Books You Haven't Read

It’s almost a sort of self-help book for scholars. Feels like cheating but in a very honest, sincere and sensible way.

Translated from the French by Jeffrey Mehlman Writing a review of this book after reading it is somewhat problematic for several reasons. I selected it based on the idiosyncratic and seemingly tongue-in-cheek title, because of a propensity I have been accused of indulging in the past, particularly related to movies I haven't seen. Turns out, Bayard is quite serious, and maybe quite right. Selecting a particular book to read entails, especially in today's avalanche of printed materials, the rejection of the overwhelming flood of books one has now chosen not to read. I consider myself a voracious reader, and having kept a database of reviews of every book I have read since mid-2002, I realize that while reading 625 books over those 80 months, I have fallen drastically far behind. Without googling the publishing statistics, I would gainsay that there have been many single days in that time period where more new books were published than I read over the 80 months. Bayard tells of a character, a librarian, in a book called "The Man Without Qualities" by Robert Musil; the librarian, faced with the impossibility of knowing all the books, resolves never to read any of them, only reading books about books. As Bayard elucidates, cultural literacy depends not on having read any particular book (in opposition to educators and critics who provide us with lists of essential knowledge and berate us for failing to absorb it), but on understanding the relationships between books. For example, Bayard uses the example of another literary character who has (fatally to his career as an English professor) admitted to not having read "Hamlet": "Ringbaum certainly has at his disposal a great deal of information about it and, in addition to Laurence Olivier's movie adaptation [which he had seen], is familiar with other plays by Shakespeare. Even without having had access to its contents, he is perfectly well equipped to gauge its position within the collective library." 'Collective library" is Bayard's term for the set of books that constitute our cultural literacy. This library, when it enters conversation, becomes a "virtual library" as each party in the conversation brings to the book their own "inner library." The books in these different libraries might have the same titles, but not the same content as each reader (or non-reader) brings a "screen book" (a mental image of what is in the book which may have been read, nonread, skimmed, forgotten, unknown, judged by its author, judged by its critics, judged by its reviews). This is far from a justification of or argument for illiteracy; Bayard is never flippant about the value of non-reading, and suggests that it may be the most valuable form of reading (of which I have listed several forms in the previous parenthesis). One must be quite literate to discuss books not read because then one must be paying attention to the culture at large, understanding the shelving arrangements, as it were, of the colle

Professor of literature and psychoanalyst Pierre Bayard wrote "How To Talk about Books You Haven't Read" to tell us that we shouldn't feel guilty about not having read the classics, or skimming them, or discussing books with which we have no personal experience at all. This is a perfectly acceptable social activity. It's more important to understand a book's place in the culture, in our "collective library", than to have an intimate knowledge of it. There is more than one way to read, which encompass several types of non-reading. And people lie about what books they have read anyway. He has a point. Few people hesitate to offer opinions on subjects about which they know little. Indeed, social discourse would decline precipitously if we didn't. Discussion of books is no exception. Bayard claims that only finance and sex can compete with books as subjects for which people so often exaggerate their achievement. I don't doubt that this is true in France, where literature is practically fetishized. Bayard believes that achieving cultural literacy is a more practical and worthwhile goal for the average reader than absorbing the literature itself, and this is easily achieved through cursory or indirect contact with books. He has a point there too. Cultural literacy is by and large achieved indirectly. People do come to understand a book's place in the culture through talk of the book more than by reading the book itself. In this way, books (and other media) are the equivalent of the stories in which oral cultures for thousands of years imbedded the values, anxieties, and information that shaped their societies. It never mattered if anyone remembered the story exactly as they heard it. People are good at gleaning the memorable ideas through non-reading, as is evidenced by countless classes of literature students. But the value of reading vs non-reading depends upon whether you think that books serve a social purpose, like the oral traditions of old, or a personal one. Do we read to enable interaction with our culture, or with the language and ideas of the text itself? People obviously do both. Bayard may be right that we should shed the guilt about not having read the book. Then there would be no reason to lie in order to discuss the ideas that a book reputedly presents. But reading -or non-reading- for social purposes is an entirely different pursuit than reading for pleasure or personal knowledge. **In the spirit of non-reading, I wrote the above paragraphs before I read the book, based on reviews and an interview with the author. Below is what I have to add based on reading the book.** Now I'm confident that reviewing before reading was the right thing to do. M. Bayard warns against reading before reviewing in chapters 10 and 12. If I had taken that approach, I might have insulted his principles. But I'm puzzled by the reviews I read beforehand. They all omitted an important piece of information: This book is satire. Oh, I'm sure Bayard believes

An entertaining satire, beautifully translated, on the world of "professional readers", but including really everyone who reads widely and eclectically. Bayard instructs, with tongue appropriately in cheek, us on how to give lectures, converse with critics, authors, and even Professors at length on books that one has not actually read...or read and forgotten. The satire is like the creamy chocolate whose center is expected to be soft, but actually contains a steel ball-bearing of important literary theory, appreciation of which leads to a much greater understanding of literature and its place in our lives. As "no man is an island", so no book stands alone but rather occupies a place somewhere in our own great personal virtual library. The book that I am writing about here is, of course, not the book that you are going to read should you buy it. I have, unconsciously, matched its words, paraphrased it, corrected it, all to conform with my own personal reality and the result is that my book cannot be the same as yours. We might even have a fight over this book, a fight entirely due to the fact that we have read "different books". Different again from the book Professor Bayard thinks that he wrote !! David

As a voracious reader, I was intrigued by the title of this book. As I started reading it, I was at first confused, and perhaps I might have remained so had I not been forced to discuss its contents in a book group. There, aspects of Bayard's purpose became more well defined. As our nation becomes one of non-readers, what is said here is important, even if couched in a satirical manner. A teacher of French literature and a psychoanalyst, Bayard recognized the phenomenon of non-reading and apparently decided to address it. The surprising thing is that everyone in the book group confessed to being guilty of one sort of non-reading or another. Until Bayard laid it all out, some of us were not even aware of the different ways in which to "non-read" a work: there's skimming, not even opening the book, hearing about it from others, reading reviews, etc. Worst of all, there is reading it then forgetting one had ever done so. The latter I do disagree with, for even though I might not be able to recall anything about the content on my own, I can be reminded by someone else. And having read a work, it becomes part of who I am, even if subliminally. By using the works of others to illustrate his points, Bayard brings to the reader the value of even well-known stories, and puts us in touch with obscure stories in which having read or not read something is a part. His including "Groundhog Day" was something of a surprise, yet it brought some of the discussion down from the heights of high literature, pointing out that some subjects are present in many genre. Hiding the fact that one has not read a book, or not being ashamed of not having read it, can be most cleverly done. One of the charming things about this work is the beauty of the language. The translator did a marvelous job. Although the volume is slender, this is a work that should be savored, perhaps even re-read. It's worth the time and money.

My caveat is first of all that I left the book at home so I am soloing here: In a nod to how famous this book is already, let me just repeat: It's about not feeling guilty that you haven't read all the books you talk about. It also discusses the converse, of which I myself am guilty: If I've read and forgotten a book, then I can no longer claim to have read it. Also, no one can completely know a book. Any one person's reading of a book is just that: his/her own interpretation of a memory. But the fun thing is that the book takes on a life of its own in people's conversations about it(How to Talk About Books...certainly has); so, as he says, the text is "mobile." My first reaction, as I skimmed the whole thing was, "This is completely hysterical. Hahaha!" Then as I was leafing through it to find parts to show someone, I saw two actually very serious chapters, about 3/4 towards the end. The first of these was about a literary critic in a novel by Balzac; Here PB is the meanest about not reading. The next chapter was a delightful portrayal of the book, I Am a Cat: Three Volumes in One, by Soseki, a japanese author. Re: that book: Bayard was admiring, in spite of himself, of the people who can pull off not-reading so brilliantly that they can even call another person's bluff(or can they). So I was totally and seriously gripped by these two. I also recommend the chapter where Bayard quotes Small World by David Lodge. Funny and a good cautionary tale. Small World is a tour de force of academic novels. When you get toward the end of How to Talk About Books, you realize that this is all pointing toward 1) encouraging students' creativity and intellectual independence in general, and 2) maybe even a sequel, "How to Write!" If it weren't for this ending, I might even suspect that this book had an ulterior motive of actually being read. As Bayard says, discussing a book quite often leads to going back and reading more, which he hopes you will do. And I think he'd rather you read some of it than none at all.