Faking it

Author Pierre Bayard. (Renaud Monfourny/Raincoast Books)

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. Then there are all the new releases. According to the book industry, a new title is published roughly every half-hour — and that, dear reader, is only counting novels. It’s enough to make you want to turn off your Itty Bitty Book Light — for good.

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. A 177-page essay, How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, was a bestseller when it came out in France earlier this year, selling 10,000 copies. It has been published in 23 countries, with the English edition released earlier this month.

“There is an ambiguity to this book that propelled its success,” Bayard said in a recent interview in a noisy café in the Belleville section of Paris. Sporting a blazer and a shock of black hair, his most distinguishing feature is an unwavering, impish grin. “Many people bought this book because they thought it was a recipe to use when you don’t have time to read books, but that’s not at all the aim of the book. The book is humoristic. This isn’t a book to discourage reading. It’s exactly the contrary.”

In his nutty and brilliant treatise, Bayard runs roughshod over conventional thinking about how to be well read, arguing that non-reading deserves respect. “It is a genuine activity,” Bayard writes, “one that consists of adopting a stance in relation to the immense tide of books that protects you from drowning. On that basis, it deserves to be defended and even taught.”

Bayard, who also works as a psychoanalyst, claims that we need to work through our shame about all the books we haven’t read and all the unconscious guilt that stems from it. Only then can we survive the avalanche of literature in the world, and actually enjoy ourselves when discussions turn to books. With Bayard’s guidance, there’s no need to continue to sheepishly stuff our faces with bread whenever the subject of literature comes up at the dinner table.

Though Bayard wrote How to Talk About Books from the perspective of a detached, third-person narrator, he admits he shares many of the sentiments expressed within — most notably anxiety. “I felt it when I was young because I don’t belong to a privileged class, and it was difficult for me to reach an upper level in culture,” he said. “There were many books, and I didn’t know how to succeed in reading them all.”

(Raincoast Books)

Given that doing so is impossible, we have to make do with what we have. Bayard has devised a classification system for all the books we’re not going to clear our schedules for: books we’ve never heard of; books we’ve heard of but haven’t read ; books we’ve skimmed; and books we’ve read but forgotten. He meditates on each subset for an entire chapter, exploring how barely glancing at a book might be equal to reading every word of it. He valiantly defends the art of skimming (“Proust’s habit of drawing associations from the smallest detail might seem to encourage a critic to do likewise with Proust’s work, as opposed to actually reading it”) and questions the value of reading any book all the way through (“What we preserve of the books we read . . . is in truth no more than a few fragments afloat, like so many islands, on an ocean of oblivion”).

Drawing from literary luminaries like Montaigne, Valéry and Bill Murray’s character in the movie Groundhog Day, Bayard shows us how to discuss all manner of unread books. “It is not at all necessary to be familiar with what you’re talking about in order to talk about it accurately,” Bayard’s narrator maintains, adding that talking about a book you haven’t read is actually an avenue for creativity and self-discovery. He goes on to argue that if you actually read a book, you will probably be in a worse position to discuss it than had you abstained: you’ll get bogged down in the details. It’s much better to ponder the book in question from a distance, and use your powers of ingenuity to cook up an opinion. As Bayard craftily suggests, “Knowing how to speak with finesse about something with which we are unacquainted has value far beyond the realm of books.

“We only teach one way of reading: from the first sentence to the last sentence,” Bayard said. “It’s a good method, but there are also other ways. A good reader can use that method on one book and another method on another one.” As a literary critic and literature professor, Bayard said he has to speed-read all the time. He admits his preferred non-speed-reading material is a good detective novel.

In order to become comfortable with Bayard’s system of avoiding the books we don’t really want to read, we must first understand that books aren’t the fixed objects we like to think they are. “I tried to break down the barrier between read books and unread books,” he said. “I try to stress creativity in reading.”

The book’s narrator posits that it is impossible to discuss books with others, since we each experience books individually, using them as repositories for our own fantasies and illusions. To underscore this point, the narrator encourages us to think about a book we loved as a child and then to go back and re-examine it. It’s unlikely that the interpretations bear much resemblance to each other. Even books we have read in adulthood rarely stand the test of time.

Thus, is it wiser to familiarize oneself with what Bayard calls the “collective library,” which consists of all the books that are regularly talked about: prominent new releases and a few classics. This way, if a book that you’re unfamiliar with comes up in conversation, you can still try to place it within the collective library and sound very smart. Here is where all the time-worn “isms,” the trend of 23-year-old memoirists and the McSweeney’s school of heartless irony might come into play.

Of course, if you have a chance to skim a book, you would not be ill-served to do so. “Skimming books without actually reading them does not in any way prevent you from commenting on them,” Bayard writes. “It’s even possible that this is the most efficient way to absorb books, respecting their inherent depth and richness without getting lost in the details.”

Another smart thing to do, he says, is to pay attention to all the other clues at hand — the book’s cover, the criticism it is generating, any biographical facts we might already know about the author.

Should we find ourselves confronted with direct questions about a completely foreign title, it’s best to invent something about how we personally related to the book or come up with a completely preposterous statement that could be misconstrued as genius. And if we are called out on our ignorance, Bayard’s narrator assures us, we can always backtrack and say we misremembered. But this is an unlikely scenario — it depends on others actually having read the book.

How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read is published by Raincoast Books and is in stores now.

Lauren Mechling is a New York writer.

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