In this delightfully witty, provocative book, literature professor and psychoanalyst Pierre Bayard argues that not having read a book need not be an impediment to having an interesting conversation about it. (In fact, he says, in certain situations reading the book is the worst thing you could do.) Using examples from such writers as Graham Greene, Oscar Wilde, Montaigne, and Umberto Eco, he describes the varieties of “non-reading”-from books that you’ve never heard of to books that you’ve read and forgotten-and offers advice on how to turn a sticky social situation into an occasion for creative brilliance. Practical, funny, and thought-provoking, How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read-which became a favorite of readers everywhere in the hardcover edition-is in the end a love letter to books, offering a whole new perspective on how we read and absorb them.
Source: How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read by Pierre Bayard
With How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, Pierre Bayard explains how we are always already talking about books we have not read because we cannot ever actually read them. I wrote a longer response here.
ᔥ  Austin Kleon — How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read by Pierre… ()
Marginalia
Foreword
what I liked best about Pierre Bayard’s sly meditation on the permissibility, the importance, and the sheer necessity of not reading is how, without our quite being aware of it, it becomes a study of the psychology of reading and of the purposes of literature, and a hymn to the pleasures of reading and to all the reasons why we cannot live without it.
—Francine Prose
Preface
Our relation to books is a shadowy space haunted by the ghosts of memory, and the real value of books lies in their ability to conjure these specters.
I Books You Don’t Know
Most statements about a book are not about the book itself, despite appearances, but about the larger set of books on which our culture depends at that moment. It is that set, which I shall henceforth refer to as the collective library, that truly matters, since it is our mastery of this collective library that is at stake in all discussions about books.
III Books You Have Heard Of
To a significant extent, our discourse about books focuses on the discourse of other people about those books, and so forth ad infinitum. The abbey’s library stands as a luminous symbol of such discourse about discourse, in which the book itself disappears in a fog of language, since libraries are the site par excellence of infinite commentary.
The second volume of Aristotle’s Poetics, impossible to find even in a library of infinite capacity, is no different from most other books we discuss in our lives. They are all reconstructions of originals that lie so deeply buried beneath our words and the words of others that, even were we prepared to risk our lives, we stand little chance of ever finding them within reach.
V Encounters in Society
For we are more than simple shelters for our inner libraries; we are the sum of these accumulated books. Little by little, these books have made us who we are, and they cannot be separated from us without causing us suffering. Just as Martins cannot bear to hear criticism of the novels written by his heroes, comments that challenge the books in our inner libraries, attacking what has become a part of our identity, may wound us to the core of our being.
VI Encounters with Professors
We might further speculate that every writer is driven by the attempt to discover and give form to his inner book and is perpetually dissatisfied with the actual books he encounters, including his own, however polished they may be. How indeed might we begin to write, or continue doing so, without that ideal image of a perfect book—one congruent to ourselves, that is—which we endlessly seek and constantly approach, but never reach?
Like collective inner books, individual inner books create a system for receiving other texts and participate both in their reception and their reorganization. I
VII Encounters with the Writer
As may be seen, there is only one sensible piece of advice to give to those who find themselves having to talk to an author about one of his books without having read it: praise it without going into detail. An author does not expect a summary or a rational analysis of his book and would even prefer you not to attempt such a thing. He expects only that, while maintaining the greatest possible degree of ambiguity, you will tell him that you like what he wrote.
IX Not Being Ashamed
In talking about books, we find ourselves exchanging not so much cultural objects as the very parts of ourselves we need to shore up our coherence during these threats to our narcissistic selves. Our feelings of shame arise because our very identity is imperiled by these exchanges, whence the imperative that the virtual space in which we stage them remain marked by ambiguity and play.
To speak without shame about books we haven’t read, we would thus do well to free ourselves of the oppressive image of cultural literacy without gaps, as transmitted and imposed by family and school, for we can strive toward this image for a lifetime without ever managing to coincide with it. Truth destined for others is less important than truthfulness to ourselves, something attainable only by those who free themselves from the obligation to seem cultivated, which tyrannizes us from within and prevents us from being ourselves.
XI Inventing Books
Letting books keep their ambiguity does not contradict the necessity to be assertive and impose your point of view on a book, as we saw in Balzac’s novel. It might even be its flip side. It is a way of showing that you have grasped the specific nature of the conversational space and the singularity of each participant. Even if it is a screen book that each person is discussing, it is better not to shatter the common space, but instead to leave our phantom books intact, along with our potential to non-read and to dream.
XII Speaking About Yourself
The paradox of reading is that the path toward ourselves passes through books, but that this must remain a passage. It is a traversal of books that a good reader engages in—a reader who knows that every book is the bearer of part of himself and can give him access to it, if only he has the wisdom not to end his journey there. And it is a traversal of just this type that we have observed in readers as diverse and as inspired as Valéry, Rollo Martins, or certain of my students who, when latching onto a single element from a work they know only vaguely or not at all, pursue their own reflection with no concern for anything else and thus take care not to lose sight of themselves.
Epilogue
Paralyzed by the respect due to texts and the prohibition against modifying them, forced to learn them by heart or to memorize what they “contain,” too many students lose their capacity for escape and forbid themselves to call on their imagination in circumstances where that faculty would be extraordinarily useful.
To show them, instead, that a book is reinvented with every reading would give them the means to emerge unscathed, and even with some benefit, from a multitude of difficult situations.