How to talk about books you haven’t read
Mark K April 19th, 2008
I’ve found the perfect book for my book group, Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read.
As I described in a previous post, it’s been an ongoing struggle to get a group guys to actually read a book before coming together to discuss it. So now Bayard offers the perfect solution – you don’t actually have to read a book in order to carry on an intelligent conversation about it, with the added bonus of possibly convincing others that you have actually read it!
Bayard’s contention is that a classroom setting is the only place where you are expected to memorize a book and then regurgitate the facts on a test. Each of us, whether we actually read the entire book or not, only keep selected memories from the book, memories which are often colored by our own experiences and what we want to take from the book. When we discuss a book, we are trading comments about the way that book affected each of us and how it relates to the culture in general, not reciting the chapter and verse of what we have read.
He recommends these accepted ways of not reading the book:
- just skim
- don’t even pick it up
- get your information from secondary sources such as reviews
- read it, but then forget it
Bayard claims that reading a book in its entirety might actually distract one from having a good discussion about the book and to reinforce his point, quotes Oscar Wilde, who once said, “I never read a book I must review, it prejudices you so.”
In that spirit, I’ve decided to recommend this book to my book group which is meeting next week. I will leave it to their own judgment as far as how they want to actually “read” the book.
Who knows, I might actually read it myself!
