How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read

A READER WRITES: “I recommend that Chris reads 'How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read' by Pierre Bayard. I thought it was a great book.

BB SAYS: Yes, that’s a good little read, and it addresses many of the issues that Chris raises in his post, such as why people pretend to like books that they do not really like, and why they pretend to have read books that they have not really read. Pierre Bayard is a French academic who teaches literature at universities for a living. He gives lectures on Proust, even though he says he has only ever skimmed through In Search of Lost Time. He says he frequently pontificates about Joyce’s Ulysses, even though he has never read it. He says that not having read a book is not necessarily any reason not to talk about it or not to have an opinion about it.

As a general rule, we can divide human beings into those who read too little and those who read too much. Often we don’t give due consideration to the problem of reading too much. The philosopher Schopenhauer once said that reading can frequently become a substitute for thinking. Reading can also damage your imagination and creativity – how many great writers from history have PhDs in Literature? A scholar has been defined as: someone who gets paid to read the books that are too boring for the rest of us to read. In general, I try to follow Flaubert’s advice: read in order to live.

(Confession to my readers: I have not actually read How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read by Pierre Bayard, but readers will note how this did not prevent me from discussing it knowledgeably and intelligently).