Books You Haven't Read

Of books there is no end and much study is a weariness of the flesh

Though many books eclipse it in genius, few books eclipse Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read in truthfulness. Everyone has had a conversation where a book everyone is supposed to have read comes up and you pretend to have read it. What Bayard suggests is that, odds are, the other people in the conversation haven’t read it either. More to the point, even if they did, that shouldn’t stop you from talking about it. The idea that you have to read a book to talk about it has generated “a widespread hypocrisy” in which we all to some extent participate.