The Bluffers Guide to Not-Reading

Perhaps only a French professor of literature could write a book entitled How to Talk About Books You Have Not Read. Professor Pierre Bayard's book became a best-seller in France this year, and one can see why. After all, a book that promises to lift the oppressive guilt one feels at not having tackled many of the giant literary peaks has a lot to be said for it. At the very least this guilt leaves one feeling somewhat inadequate, especially when one compares the amount of reading done by one's forbears (who admittedly didn't have the distractions of television or cinema or a thousand other things and, equally, for the lucky few, could rely upon servants to relieve them from much of the drudgery of ordinary life. But still...)

As the TLS notes, Bayard suggests that:

"in order to . . . talk without shame about books we haven’t read, we should rid ourselves of the oppressive image of a flawless cultural grounding, transmitted and imposed [on us] by the family and by educational institutions, an image which we try all our lives in vain to match up to. For truth in the eyes of others matters less than being true to ourselves, and this truth is only accessible to those who liberate themselves from the constraining need to appear cultured, which both tyrannizes us and prevents us from being ourselves."

This, of course, is fine, comforting stuff.

I nodded in recognition at this too:

"He divides the works he mentions into four categories: “LI” indicates “livres inconnus” (books he is unfamiliar with); “LP” “livres parcourus” (books glanced at); “LE” “livres dont j’ai entendu parler” (books he has heard discussed) and “LO” “les livres que j’ai oubliés” (books he has read but forgotten). Ulysses, for example, falls into the category “LE”: he claims not to have read the novel, but he can place it within its literary context, knows that it is in a sense a reprise of the Odyssey, that it follows the ebb and flow of consciousness, and that it takes place in Dublin over the course of a single day. When teaching he makes frequent and unflinching references to Joyce."

Many of us who have dipped in and out of Joyce without ever feeling compelled to finish Ulysses will know what Bayard is talking about here. Not everyone is quite so understanding, mind you. I recall a Cambridge interview in which the don seemed unimpressed with my using the novels of Sir Walter Scott to illustrate a point despite not having, well, read any of them myself (an attempt to shift the discussion to Scott's poetry which I had actually read proved unsuccessfull). But Scott's Waverley novels were, for me at least, LE novels.

And being LE novels, it has consequently been harder for Scott's novels to make the great leap from being books with which I am familiar to the honoured states of being books I have actually read. In that respect, a LI (livre inconnu) has a better chance, if it is lucky, of eventually being read. So, yes, I  agree with the professor that it's certainly not necessary to have read a book to be capable of talking about it.

The good professor makes another good point:

The second constraint “could be called the obligation to read a book in its entirety. If non-reading is frowned on, speed-reading and skimming are viewed in as poor a light”. For example, “it would be almost unthinkable for professors of literature to admit – what is after all true for most of them – that they have merely skimmed Proust’s work”. Can this really be the case? If so, it’s a dismaying thought – presumably Bayard has had some explaining to do to his colleagues since his book was published in France earlier this year.

Well I would not be surprised if this was indeed the case. Literature departments at universities around the world are well-stocked with frauds after all. So too, of course, are the book pages of your newspaper. You may think that the book reviews you read are the product of careful reading and even more careful consideration. That is a foolish assumption, especially if the book in question is more than 400 pages long. Skimming and skipping are standard operating procedure. It can often be foolish or, in economic terms, irrational to read all the book: ten hours reading followed by an hour's thought and an hour writing for a couple of hundred dollars is not an especially rewarding use of time. After all almost every book published today could have usefully been pruned before being offered to the public.

That being said, dear, gentle reader, what books, what authors even, remain terra incognita to you? To start this confessional I'll admit that, among too many others, I've never read either Proust or George Elliot.

UPDATE: Unlike the rest of the world I've never read JK Rowling. Much, much more appallingly, I'm also woefully ignorant when it comes to, um, Nabokov and Saul Bellow. I have read some of Nabokov's essays but not, alas, his novels. This requires me to make the case, naturally, that Nabokov was a better essayist than novelist.

Comments

[Jim Barnett]

How about a new category: LR, for "Livres que je regrette d'avior lus" - books I have regretted reading. I'd put Nabokov in that category - "The Gift" was just the sort of prissy, self-satisfied blather that I had always suspected Nabokov had produced. I should have known better and left it as an LE, but I foolishly took it on a trip and got stuck reading it.

[James Barlow]

A related strategy is to wilfully misunderstand classic works with the purpose of avoiding the ensuing conversation.

I once attended a dinner party at which the woman sitting opposite started a converation on Russian literature, in particular Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment.

I brought the topic to a swift conclusion by suggesting that the book is less a study in morality and redemption that a damning critique of poor planning: Raskolnikov sabotages his efforts to rob an old woman by bringing an axe when a simple bare-handed strangulation would do the job.

The literature buff ignored me for the rest of the evening. I was very happy with this outcome.

[Tim Worstall]

"It can often be foolish or, in economic terms, irrational to read all the book: ten hours reading followed by an hour's thought and an hour writing for a couple of hundred dollars is not an especially rewarding use of time."

Quite: thus my policy of only reviewing books that I would have read anyway.

[alice]

I work for the Books supplement of a national British newspaper and have skim-read many books in my time, but never one that I was reviewing. Nor do I have colleagues who do so. In fact, an almost disproportionate amount of care and seriousness is lavished on book reviews, in my experience.

[Joanne Jacobs]

I write book reviews too from time to time. I always read the book, however painful that may be. I always complain about how little I'm paid.

[Robert]

You guys do a wonderful job! Keep up the good work!!!8

[jeroen]

Fascinating site and well worth the visit. I will be back

[Neil Mackenzie]

Harpers has a short piece by the late David Foster Wallace in which he writes about being nice in book reviews:

I've had to back out of certain book reviews, for example, because it turned out that I hated the book, the book was simply bad, and I simply refused to spend a week and 750 words skewering a book or explaining point by point why it was bad ... mainly because I have myself been skewered, and know how it feels, and after a certain age I just didn't have the stomach to do it to someone else.

[Elvis]

I can find the prayer I want. I thank God for this website.