How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read (Hardcover)

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: parallel action, collective library, inner book, New York, David Lodge, Oscar Wilde (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"It may well be that too many books are published, but by good fortune, not all must be read.... A survivor's guide to life in the chattering classes...evidently much in need." --New York Times --This text refers to the Audio Cassette edition.

Review

Praise for How to Talk About Books You Havent Read:

 

"I probably shouldn't bring any of this up, but Mr. Bayard holds that one of the best reasons for reading a book is that it allows you to talk about yourself. How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read is an amusing disquisition on what is required to establish cultural literacy in a comfortable way. Lightly laced with irony, the book nonetheless raises such serious questions as: What are our true motives for reading? Is there an objective way to read a book? What do we retain from the books we've read?"--Joseph Epstein, Wall Street Journal

 

“Witty and charming and often fun.”—Sam Anderson, New York Magazine

 

"I read and adored Pierre Bayard’s book. It's funny, smart, and so true—a wonderful combination of slick French philosophizing and tongue-in-cheek wit, and an honest appraisal of what it means, or doesn't mean, to read."--Clare Messud, author of The Emperor’s Children

“It may well be that too many books are published, but by good fortune, not all must be read…A survivor’s guide to life in the chattering classes…evidently much in need.”—New York Times

"In this work of inspired nonsense -- which nevertheless evokes our very real sense of insecurity about the gaps in our cultural knowledge -- reading is not only superfluous, it is meaningless. Our need to appear well-read is all."--Sarah Gold, Chicago Tribune

“In this hilarious and elaborate spoof, Bayard proves once again that being almost ridiculously erudite and screamingly funny are by no means mutually exclusive." —Booklist

 

“Brilliant…A witty and useful piece of literary sociology, designed to bring lasting peace of mind to the scrupulous souls who grow anxious whenever the book-talk around them becomes too specific.”—London Review of Books

 

“With rare humor, Bayard liberally rethinks the social use [of literature] and the position of the reader…Read or skim How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read. Or simply listen to what people say about it so that you can talk about it with ease. In either case, you may not be able to forget it.”—Les Inrockuptibles

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA; 1st Edition, 1st Printing edition (October 30, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1596914696
• ISBN-13: 978-1596914698
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (37 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #213,492 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

50 of 55 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "The virtues of non-reading.", November 9, 2007

By	E. Bukowsky "booklover10" (NY United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Pierre Bayard's "How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read," translated superbly from the French by Jeffrey Mehlman, comes at a time when a number of experts declare that reading in America is on the decline. Since the 2004 report from the US National Endowment for the Arts documented that Americans are reading less and less, there are more distractions than ever that keep people away from bookstores and libraries. The Internet, cable television, and other forms of entertainment, as well as the pressures of work, family, and social responsibilities quickly gobble up our days. For some people, a lack of erudition presents no problem. However, for those who would like to appear knowledgeable (even if they are anything but), Bayard comes to the rescue.

The author, a Professor of French Literature and a psychoanalyst, assures us that "it is sometimes easier to do justice to a book if you haven't read it in its entirety--or even opened it." Whew, what a relief! In addition, Bayard informs guilt-ridden non-readers that they are in very good company, since "mendacity is the rule" when it comes to reading. Few individuals who wish to be taken seriously by their peers will admit to never having read certain "canonical texts," so they simply lie and pretend to have read them. The whole spectrum of non-reading is covered here: books we've never cracked open, those we've merely skimmed, books that we've never laid eyes on but have heard about from others, and those that we read years ago and have long since forgotten. When books fade from our consciousness, we might as well not have read them at all, Bayard asserts. In many cases, "Our relation to books is a shadowy space haunted by the ghosts of memory...." Therefore, if you are a non-reader, fear not; you have nothing to be ashamed of and you are certainly not alone.

The author quotes works both well-known and obscure, such as Umberto Eco's "The Name of the Rose," Graham Greene's "The Third Man," and Balzac's "Lost Illusions" to support his thesis. He uses intricate and arcane philosophical arguments that are almost mathematical in their precision, to "prove" that one can and should avoid delving too deeply into books. He even uses his own jargon (some of which is borrowed from other disciplines) to describe ways in which non-readers relate to unread books and to one another: screen books, inner books, phantom books, virtual libraries, and the collective library.

Although to the casual reader Bayard may seem to be playing it straight, "How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read" is brilliant and subtle satire. Amazon reviewers should take special note of the Oscar Wilde quotation that serves as the book's epigraph: "I never read a book I must review; it prejudices you so." Comments such as these that demonstrate how foolish it is to actually read the books that we talk about are so absurd (although they appear logical on the surface because they are couched in such ornate language), that Bayard ends up strengthening the opposite viewpoint. Those steeped in literature, even if they do not recall every word they have read, are generally people worth knowing; they are far more interesting to talk to than those who spout empty phrases devoid of precision or depth; people's lives are richer because of their intimate knowledge of books. They do not have to worry about surviving professional and social situations on a wing and a prayter, hoping never to be exposed as frauds who profess to have literary knowledge that they lack. Ironically, Bayard ultimately demonstrates the power of books to evoke passion, sway hearts and minds, subvert the social order, and change our lives. "How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read" is provocative, thought provoking, and great fun. Rather than pretending to read it, read it!

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Non-reading as an art, November 21, 2007

By	Jon Hunt "musician, teacher" (Old Greenwich, Ct. USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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Pierre Bayard's new book, "How To Talk About Books You Haven't Read", is a bestseller in his native France and after reading/skimming it, he certainly encourages thought. From sections on "Ways of Not Reading" to "Literary Confrontations" to "Ways of Behaving", Bayard has laid out methods for making non-reading practically essential to the discourse of books. I can only imagine how book groups would dissect all of this.

Thank heavens it's a relatively short book for much of it dissolves into minutiae following routes to curious ends. The author gets tangled up in himself quite a bit and these are the easily skimmable parts. Yet he makes some terrific contributions along the way including the very core of his work....how to discuss books you haven't read. It's an anti-intellectual approach made to sound just the opposite but his humor conquers the day. My favorite chapter is one called, "Encounters With the Writer", where he persuades us that even the best writers don't know much about their own works. Bayard saves one of his best tidbits of wisdom for the end of that chapter when he says..."to those who find themselves having to talk to an author about one of his books without having read it: praise it without going into detail." Sensible advice for anyone in that situation.

Pierre Bayard has offered readers a thoughtful, if often uneven book, and I thought twice about what he says regarding critics as I write this review. But he does provoke one to think and encourage us to make those candid observations on our own. To that end, the author has succeeded.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Don't read this review, October 24, 2008

By	Todd Stockslager (Raleigh, NC) - See all my reviews

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 collective library, paying very close attention to the words of the author and her critics, and using this knowledge to talk about the unread book in its context and relation to ones own creative ideas (Bayard quotes Oscar Wilde on the primacy of criticism, especially of books one has spent no more than ten minutes reading, as a creative and autobiographical activity).

In fact, the literature professor whose career crashed did so not because he had not read "Hamlet", but because he not only admitted it but insisted on the truth and verification of it during a silly parlor game. In doing so, he violated the invisible and amorphous "personal space" each of us maintains around us about what we know, what we surmise, what we pretend, and what we don't know. "In insisting on his ignorance, he excluded himself from the indefinite cultural space that we generally allow to reign between ourselves and others with which we tacitly accord ourselves--and simultaneously accord them-a margin of ignorance. We do of course know at some level that all cultural literacy, even the most highly developed, is constructed around gaps and fissures . . . that are no real obstacle to its taking on a certain consistency as a body of information" (p. 125). Interstingly, the fired literature professor's successor had not read "Hamlet" either, but wisely, no one asked him!

So, you can see, that by reading Bayard's book (although it is a book about books, so it does qualify in the librarian's world--I have a Master's in Library Science even though I don't use it in my current career!) the whole way through, I have not only nonread thousands of other books that were published since this book, but I placed myself at a disadvantage in reviewing it to Wilde's standards! (and yes, I do read every book I review, I responded in a comment to a review earlier this week with pride, a stance that I might not take so proudly now). Now you understand why I find writing this review somewhat problematic - I have by Bayard's terms thoroughly disqualified myself for the job!

In any case, this book certainly made me think and respond viscerally (and quote out loud to my wife to her annoyance) more than any book I have read in many months. I will personally commend it to my close friend who is a very thoughtful reader, and to my oldest daughter who is a second-year graduate English student and full-time adjunct professor at the Graduate Writing Center at Liberty University.

Update: Bayard's next book Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong: Reopening the Case of the Hound of the Baskervilles expands on his concept of the "screen book" in a way that opens up textual criticism in an a fascinating way.