To Read or Not to Read

A book caught my eye at the library recently: How to Talk about Books You Haven't Read by Pierre Bayard. The spine is bright yellow, the word "haven't" is in red, and it got my attention in the same way that Growing Marijuana Indoors caught my attention in a bookstore in Berkeley a few weeks ago. I would probably pick up a book with the title Cooking with Trans Fats with the same mixture of horror and fascination. How does the author justify his position? It turns out that the marijuana author doesn't bother--he goes straight to potting soil. There's no opening paragraph touting the benefits of home-grown pot. I guess if you're buying the book, you already know.

I checked out How to Talk about Books You Haven't Read and took it home and read it, so now I can't follow Bayard's advice, at least about his book. My two sons were very interested in the title, but it doesn't take long to get the irony--you have to read the book to find out how not to have to read books. The possibility of having to read only one more book for life wasn't enough to get either one to crack it.

The basic premise of the book is that no one can ever read a fraction of all the books in the world, or even all the important or even essential books, so everyone, at some point will have to talk about a book they haven't read. The author goes through several methods of talking about books you haven't read. Frankly, I've forgotten all of them already. Bayard is a professor, and probably needs this skill, but I don't see why I do. If someone talks about a book I haven't read, I can always be quiet and listen. And besides, I have plenty of friends who never read anything at all. What I need is a book called How to Talk about Books Your Friends Haven't Read Without Boring the Pants off Them.

One of my professors in college told the class that John Milton read every book in every language that had been written up til then. He may have gotten that story from this statement by Samuel Johnson about Milton: "When he left the university he returned to his father, then residing at Horton in Buckinghamshire, with whom he lived five years; in which time he is said to have read all the Greek and Latin writers. With what limitations this universality is to be understood who shall inform us?" So you can read no books, but learn to act as if you have, or you can read all the books, (there will be no one who can check up on you) and have no one to talk to about them. Or you can do what most people sensibly do: read what you like and not worry about silly books that tell you how to talk about books you haven't read.