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

This is the real reason I personally review books on Goodreads-like Montaigne, a famous essayist, and a self-proclaimed forgetter of books-I realize that they are ephemeral, that my experience of them disappears, sometimes to where I forget the book entirely. You will note that there is no category for having read a book, for as soon as we read the words on the pages we start to forget them. Instead there would be: Books that are unknown to me (I don't know about them and am not aware of them) Books that I have skimmed Books that I have heard about (you can know lots about Romeo and Juliet even if you've never read the play) and finally, Books that I have Forgotten. If Pierre Bayard was in charge of Goodreads, the three standard categories (Read, Currently Reading, Want to Read) would be entirely eliminated. He has translated works by Derrida, Lacan, Blanchot, and other authors. Jeffrey Mehlman is a professor of French at Boston University and the author of a number of books, including Emigré New York. He is the author of Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? and of many other books. Pierre Bayard is a professor of French literature at the University of Paris VIII and a psychoanalyst. It's a book for book lovers everywhere to enjoy, ponder, and argue about-and perhaps even read. Practical, funny, and thought-provoking, How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read is in the end a love letter to books, offering a whole new perspective on how we read and absorb them.

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. (In fact, he says, in certain situations reading the book is the worst thing you could do). In this delightfully witty, provocative book, a huge hit in France that has drawn attention from critics and readers around the world, 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. If cultured people are expected to have read all the significant works of literature, and thousands more are published each year, what are we supposed to do in those inevitable social situations where we're forced to talk about books we haven't read?

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