How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read by Pierre Bayard

At first, I thought this would be a rather clever-clever, smirking sort of book. At the start Bayard, a French intellectual, quotes Oscar Wilde, who said he would never actually read a book he was writing about, because "it prejudices you so". But this is not a guide for lazy people — it's really a book about our relationship with books. And one of the main things about books is that, however much you read, you can only read a tiny fraction of all the books in the world.

And then, once you've read them, you forget them anyway. But books have a huge cultural power, whether you read them or not — they seep into the culture. As Paul Valéry pointed out, lots of people can talk endlessly about Proust. But how many read him? This is not, then, a disdainful swipe at books, but a love letter to them..

Synopsis by Foyles.co.uk

In this disarmingly mischievous and provocative book, already a runaway bestseller in France, Pierre Bayard contends that in this age of infinite publication, the truly cultivated person is not the one who has read a book, but the one who understands the book's place in our culture. Drawing on examples from works by Graham Greene, Umberto Eco, Oscar Wilde, Montaigne (who couldn't remember books he himself had written), and many others, he examines the many kinds of 'non-reading' (forgotten books, unknown books, books discussed by others, books we've skimmed briefly) and the many potentially nightmarish situations in which we are called upon to discuss our reading with others (with our loved ones, with the book's author, etc.).At heart, this is a book that will challenge everyone who's ever felt guilty about missing some of the Great Books to consider what reading means, how we absorb books as part of ourselves, and how and why we spend so much time talking about what we have, or haven't, read.