How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read by Pierre Bayard. c2007 Published in the US by Bloomsbury USA Translated from the French by Jeffrey Mehlman

This was not the book I meant to talk about this week, but during a long overdue dusting, sorting and culling of my books, this one fell out on my foot. I don’t remember when I bought it, and somehow I had not read it. It was love at second sight! I still remember the day I was treated to a shocked silence in the bookstore where I worked, when I admitted to a co-worker that I had not read Ulysses by James Joyce. “But, it is a seminal work!”, I can hear the tone yet! I am sorry, people in Dublin, but after that I have been determined NOT to read it. You have a list in your head of books that you “should” have read but haven’t. Do you think that list will be posted on your gravestone? Mr. Bayard will set you free in this discussion of our current reading culture and how to navigate social or professional literary conversations around books you have not read or have forgotten.

The author’s words:

“There is a tacit understanding in our culture that one must read a book in order to talk about it with any precision. In my experience, however, 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.”

“If we wish, then, to learn how to emerge unscathed from conversations about books we haven’t read, it will be necessary to analyze the unconscious guilt that an admission of non-reading elicits. It is to help assuage such guilt, at least in part that is the goal of this book.”

Analyze and assuage he does. Mr. Bayard is a literature professor and a psychoanalyst. His book is full of examples of types of non-reading from famous writers, ideas to ponder, and strategies to help you speak about books you haven’t read without shame.

Oscar Wilde, as quoted in the front of the book: “I never read a book I must review; it prejudices you so.”

Do read this book, really.