How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read

by Pierre Bayard

Have you read Shakespeare? Proust? War and Peace? Moby Dick? Middlemarch? Ulysses?

(Has anyone actually read Ulysses?)

Let’s face it, you can’t read everything. You probably don’t want to read everything.

So what are we supposed to do when the polite conversation turns to a classic book, or the latest Atwood, Ondaatje or Vassanji we haven’t actually read?

Fear not! Professor Pierre Bayard is at hand to save us from literary humiliation and social ostracism with his book, How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read.

“It’s totally possible”, he assures us, “to carry on an engaging conversation about a book you haven’t read — including, and perhaps especially, with someone else who hasn’t read it either.”

In fact, “it is sometimes easier to do justice to a book if you haven’t read it in its entirety — or even opened it.”

With examples from Oscar Wilde, Graham Greene, Montaigne, Umberto Eco, Marcel Proust, and even the movie Groundhog Day, How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read steers us through the social minefield of literary conversation (what exactly is the proper course of action when you meet an author whose book you haven’t read?), and offers advice to turn sticky social situations into opportunities for creative brilliance.

Charming, erudite, and mercifully irreverent, How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read is a must-have for anyone with reader guilt (or a dinner party to attend).

NEWS

Pierre Bayard was interviewed on CBC Radio One’s The Current.
Listen to the interview in part 2 of the show.

The New York Times has named How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read one of its 100 Notable Books of the Year!

EVERYONE IS TALKING ABOUT How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read

Canadian Reviews

The Globe and Mail, November 3rd, 2007 (Martin Levin)
“Maybe you've bought Michael Ondaatje’s Divisadero with the best of intentions, but it’s just lying there, admonishing you.

Now you’re wondering how you’re going to get through the next few weeks without seeming like an arrant poseur.

Well, I’m here to help. Not by giving you potted synopses. No, I’m going to help by introducing you to Pierre Bayard and his timely How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read.

This is no meant-to-be-amusing bluffer’s guide to famous books, or a checklist of views one might plausibly hold about them without being embarrassingly challenged. Rather, it’s a witty, intelligent essay in anti-criticism by a professor of French literature at the University of Paris.”

The Winnipeg Free Press, November 4th, 2007 (Morley Walker)
“Bayard’s central point is not that we shouldn’t read, but rather that we shouldn’t feel guilty or inadequate for not having read any particular book, however current or canonical.

There are simply too many of them, and even the most prodigious reader can absorb but an infinitesimal fraction of what he calls ‘the universal library.’

Yet, Bayard insists, this shouldn’t prevent people from voicing their opinions on what they haven’t consumed. He agrees with literary critics (and husbands) everywhere: ‘It is not at all necessary to be familiar with what you are talking about in order to talk about it accurately.’”

The Georgia Straight (Vancouver), November 15th, 2007 (John Burns)
“Deeply rooted in the tradition of French psychoanalytic philosophy (hence, the whole thing could be an abstruse joke), How to Talk concludes that not only is the author dead, but the book too. All that remains is library as singles’ bar, each creator/consumer locked to the next in simultaneous, symbiotic self-regard. Vive la France!”

The Toronto Star, November 18th, 2007 (Nathan Whitlock)
“The knowledge we as individuals and as a collective have of books is imprecise, chimerical and full of gaps. We possess mistaken notions of books we haven't read, yet are often well-informed about unread books — many of us can talk about Hamlet and Ulysses, for example, whether we’ve read them or not. In some cases, our mistaken idea of a book is more interesting and intellectually fruitful than the actual book… Once we free ourselves from the inhibiting idea that a book must be read to be understood and discussed, a whole new world emerges.”

The National Post, September 29th, 2007 (Elizabeth Schaal)
“I was more than a little intrigued by a book that landed this week: How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, by a Parisian academic and psychoanalyst, Pierre Bayard. I haven’t read it yet, but a Times of London review offers a summary of Bayard’s tips on how I might talk wisely about it and other books whose spines remain uncracked: ‘Avoid precise details. Put aside rational thought. Let your subconscious express your personal relationship with the work.’ If called on to review the book, ‘write about yourself’ instead.”

The Vancouver Sun, September 8th, 2007, and
The Saskatoon Star-Phoenix, September 22nd, 2007 (Rebecca Wigod)
“Faithful books-pages readers will want to at least skim How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, by Pierre Bayard, a French cause celebre coming in November from Raincoast Books.”

The Ottawa Citizen – November 3rd, 2007, and
The Vancouver Sun – November 8th, 2007 (Leonard Stern)
“The book is causing a mini-scandal in the academy, because Mr. Bayard has coyly hinted that he himself hasn’t fully read the works of Marcel Proust, even though he is, ahem, a Proust scholar.

Mr. Bayard is trying, mischievously, to make a point about the state of education. He has said, for example, that the sort of “book reports” his 14-year-old son is forced to produce at school are a waste of time, focusing as they do obsessively on names, dates and other details.

Schools ... are churning out students who are expert at reproducing facts, but who won’t take creative risks and draw meaning from those facts. As Mr. Bayard told one interviewer last week, a technical approach to reading ... ‘prevents people from inventing another kind of reading, which should be a form of wandering, as in a garden.’”

The Calgary Herald, October 7th, 2007 (Eric Volmers)
“For the lazier intellectual, there’s Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk About Book You Haven’t Read. A French lit professor in Paris, Bayard namechecks everyone from Graeme Greene to Oscar Wilde and Proust in his sneaky screed about how to fake familiarity with books you’ve never opened. Bayard’s book is a good start, but he also seems to assume we’re well-versed enough in Wilde’s views on “non-reading” or the climax of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose to cop their ideas.”

Geist Magazine, Fall 2007 (Alberto Manguel)
“Before reading Comment parler des livres que l’on n’a pas lus?, I judged it a pleasantly sarcastic, underhandedly antiintellectual, slightly pretentious mixture of self-confession and cultural manifesto. I’m delighted to see that reading it confirms my early opinion. And by the way, it also supports Bayard’ provocative thesis.”

CBC Arts Online, October 29th, 2007 (Lauren Mechling)
“Chances are, the 801-page Mao biography you’ve been meaning to get around to since last Christmas is still collecting dust on your nightstand — not to mention the latest Harry Potter, the Princess Diana biography and the first edition of The Sheltering Sky your uncle gave you for your birthday... Enter Pierre Bayard, a literature professor at the University of Paris VIII, who has written a guidebook for those of us who have reached the breaking point.”

American Reviews

New York Times Magazine, Sunday Styles, November 11th, 2007 (Liesl Schillinger)
“Last year [Bayard] amused Europe with his subversive book, How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read. Now it has been translated for the delectation of American nonreaders by Jeffrey Mehlman (who evidently did read it). In Mr. Bayard’s opinion, reading books is overrated. ‘In my experience,’ Mr. Bayard declares, ‘it’s totally possible to carry on an engaging conversation about a book you haven’t read — including, and perhaps especially, with someone else who hasn't read it either.’”

New York Times Book Review, November 11th, 2007 (Jay MacInerney)
“Bayard’s critique of reading involves practical and theoretical as well as social considerations, and at times it seems like a tongue-in-cheek example of reader-response criticism, which emphasizes the reader’s role in creating meaning. He wants to show us how much we lie about the way we read, to ourselves as well as to others, and to assuage our guilt about the way we actually read and talk about books.”

New York Times Arts Section, November 15th, 2007
“A best seller in France, Pierre Bayard’s slim volume does not, as you might expect, offer useful cocktail party or English lit class advice. (Except this: Upon meeting the author of a book you haven’t read, “praise it without going into detail.”) Instead Mr. Bayard considers the meaning of reading and not reading within the general literary soup of what he calls the “collective library,” the “larger set of books on which our culture depends.” He supports his arguments with close readings of a variety of texts including actual books (Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose, I Am a Cat by the Japanese writer Natsume Soseki) and the movie Groundhog Day, starring Bill Murray.”

New York Times Book Review, Editor’s Choice, November 18th, 2007
“A French literature professor wants to assuage our guilt over the ways we actually read and discuss books.”

New York Magazine, November 12th 2007
“Professeur Bayard, a practicing psychoanalyst, is not so interested in practical tips. His goal is more ambitious: He wants to cure us of the deep cultural neuroses that govern our reading.”

The Wall Street Journal, November 2nd, 2007 (Joseph Epstein)
“Some of us have read more books than others, but everyone has failed to read something of significance. Not to worry, Mr. Bayard counsels. Just because one hasn’t read a book doesn’t mean that one cannot talk about it with the same confidence as someone who has, and perhaps with greater acumen, not having to get bogged down in messy details.”

Entertainment Weekly, November 2nd, 2007 (Thom Geier)
“This French best-seller is less a bluffer’s guide to great literature than an intellectual defense of not reading everything. It’s not necessary to know the contents of any one book, Paris-based professor Pierre Bayard says, to place it in the collective library of great literature. (Why lose the forest for the trees?) In How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, he name-checks Montaigne, Umberto Eco, and Paul Valéry, who wrote a tribute to Marcel Proust though he had ‘scarcely read a single volume’ of the man’s work. Likewise, you need not pore over Bayard’s often circuitous prose to grasp his argument. Skim his wittily annotated table of contents instead. B”

Publishers Weekly, October 2007
Bayard (Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?), a professor of French literature at the University of Paris openly (if not entirely convincingly), confesses to having neither the time nor the inclination to do much reading. Yet he is all too aware that in his profession, one is often expected to have read the literature one is teaching or talking about with colleagues. In this extended essay, a bestseller in France, Bayard argues that the act of reading is less important than knowing the social and intellectual context of a book. He is so convinced of this that he claims there is great enjoyment — and even enlightenment — in discussing a book one has not read with someone equally unfamiliar with it. Despite appearances, Bayard’s volume is not a self-help book or a bluffer’s guide to great literature, but instead serves to warn people not to try to impress others with how much they have read. The truth is, most of the time they’re fibbing and there are many gradations between total reading and complete nonreading, he declares, including hearing about a book, skimming it and forgetting its contents. A little too much impenetrable psychoanalytic jargon sometimes threatens to overwhelm Bayard’s argument, but Bayard’s at least partly tongue-in-cheek argument about not reading is well worth reading.”

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