BookBrowse Reviews How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read by Pierre Bayard

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A book for book lovers everywhere to enjoy, ponder, and argue about—and perhaps even read

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By all rights, I shouldn’t have to read this book. After all, Pierre Bayard begins with an epigraph from Oscar Wilde: "I never read a book I must review; it prejudices you so." But I did read it, swiftly, ferociously, and with a pen in hand. Many times I underlined a sentence I admired, such as this one: "He who pokes his nose into a book is abandoning true cultivation, and perhaps even reading itself." But just as often, I underlined in fierce disagreement. This book isn’t, finally, about books, but about book conversation, and I had a particularly lively one with it.

Bayard takes the deliberately perverse stance that non-reading is an activity that should be defended and even taught. His argument begins by noting the conundrum which pinions the educated reader: on the one hand, our universities inculcate in us the value of exhaustively knowing a formidable body of classic literature; on the other hand, to read exhaustively is so impossible that, as Bayard phrases it, "reading is first and foremost non-reading." Even when we are reading a book, we are not reading all the other books in the universe, and even when we are reading a book, we are reading only the sentence in front of us, all the others disappearing into the receding horizon of our faulty memories. Everyone, from the casual reader to the literature professor, shares this experience of reading, yet we all must disavow it. Thus our attitudes toward reading are plagued with guilt, feelings of inadequacy, and anxious lies about how much we’ve actually read.

With a wave of his hand, Bayard absolves us of such guilt. He punctures the highbrow notion of perfect comprehension and retention, and instead substitutes a whole catalog of ways we non-read books: we skim them, we read about them in reviews such as this one, we read them and then forget them. All of these methods, he argues, qualify us to discuss the books we've non-read because they allow us to understand books as part of a collective library. "Culture," he writes, "is above all a matter of orientation. Being cultivated is a matter of not having read any book in particular, but of being able to find your bearings within books as a system." Bayard burnishes his manifesto with a rogues' gallery of non-readers in classic literature, from the librarian in Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities who excels at his job by virtue of not having read a single book, to Montaigne, who is so profound a non-reader of his own books that he cannot recognize them when they are quoted in his presence.

Yet as even a non-reader of Bayard's book will have intuited, Bayard’s argument is très disingenuous. How could he take us on so debonair a tour of classic literature without having read some of it? And what about the nonsocial pleasures of reading? Many readers characterize their experience of novels as absorbing, when the rest of the world melts away and they are enveloped by the pages in front of them. This, it strikes me, is the opposite of the university model of reading, not Bayard's non-reading. Indeed, Bayard's own book is so felicitous it gives the lie to his theory: I inhaled it and have been talking about it to other people ever since I closed the cover.

Perhaps it is possible to speak worthily about books you haven't read, but in order to do so, you must at least have thoroughly devoured some other ones—you must be a reader. The wonderfully self-defeating irony of How to Talk about Books You Haven't Read is that it made me want to disappear into any one of the books Bayard mentions that I haven't already read. I could talk to you about them—Bayard has equipped me to do so. But I don't want to. I’d rather read than talk.

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in November 2007, and has been updated for the October 2009 edition. Click here to go to this issue.