The great unread

Is your New Year's resolution to read more? You could always bluff it, argues Pierre Bayard


In addition, I am regularly called on to discuss books in my own publications, since these for the most part concern the books and articles of others. This is even more problematic, since unlike spoken statements - which can include imprecisions without consequence - written commentaries leave traces and can be verified.

As a result of having found myself in these all-too-familiar situations, I believe I am well positioned to convey a deeper understanding of the experience of talking about books I haven't read, and to undertake a meditation on this forbidden subject.

It is unsurprising that so few texts extol the virtues of talking about books without having read them. To address this subject demands courage, because doing so clashes inevitably with a series of internalised constraints. Three of these, at least, are crucial.

The first might be called the obligation to read. We still live in a society where reading, on the decline though it may be, remains the object of a kind of worship. This worship applies particularly to a number of canonical texts - the list varies according to the circles you move in - which it is practically forbidden not to have read if you want to be taken seriously.

The second constraint, similar to the first but nonetheless distinct, might be called the obligation to read thoroughly. If it's frowned upon not to read, it's almost as bad to read quickly or to skim, and especially to say so. For example, it's virtually unthinkable for literary intellectuals to acknowledge that they have flipped through Proust's work without having read it in its entirety - though this is certainly the case for most of them.

The third constraint concerns the way we discuss books. There is a tacit understanding in our culture that one must read a book in order to talk about it with any precision. In my experience, however, it's totally possible to carry on an engaging conversation about a book you haven't read - including, and perhaps especially, with someone else who hasn't read it either. Moreover, it is sometimes easier to do justice to a book if you haven't read it in its entirety - or even opened it.

The effect of this repressive system of obligations and prohibitions has been to generate a widespread hypocrisy on the subject of books that we actually have read. I know few areas of private life, with the exception of finance and sex, in which it's as difficult to obtain accurate information. Among specialists, mendacity is the rule, and we tend to lie in proportion to the significance of the book under consideration. Although I've read relatively little myself, I'm familiar enough with certain books - here, again, I'm thinking of Proust - to be able to evaluate whether my colleagues are telling the truth when they talk about his work, and to know that they rarely are.

These lies we tell to others are first and foremost lies we tell ourselves, for we have trouble acknowledging even to ourselves that we haven't read the books that are deemed essential. And here, as in so many other domains of life, we show an astonishing ability to reconstruct the past to better conform to our wishes.

It is all the more difficult to reflect on unread books and the discussions they engender because the concept of what might be called "non-reading" is itself unclear, and so it is often hard to know whether we're lying or not when we say that we've read a book. The very question implies that we can draw a clear line between reading and not reading, while in fact many of the ways we encounter texts sit somewhere between the two.

Between a book we've read closely and a book we've never even heard of, there is a whole range of gradations that deserve our attention. In the case of books we have supposedly read, we must consider just what is meant by reading, a term that can refer to a variety of practices. Conversely, many books that by all appearances we haven't read exert an influence on us nevertheless, as their reputations spread through society. Reading is not a simple, seamless process; it has fault lines, deficiencies and approximations.

Non-reading goes far beyond the act of leaving a book unopened. To varying degrees, books we've skimmed, books we've heard about and books we have forgotten also fall into the rich category that is non-reading. Life, in its cruelty, presents us with a plethora of situations in which we might find ourselves talking about books we haven't read.

To get to the heart of things, I believe we must significantly modify how we talk about books, even the specific words we use to describe them. Our relation to books is not the continuous and homogeneous process that certain critics would have us imagine, nor the site of some transparent self-knowledge. Our relation to books is a shadowy space haunted by the ghosts of memory, and the real value of books lies in their ability to conjure these spectres.

Translated by Jeffrey Mehlman

· Pierre Bayard's How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read is published by Granta on January 10.

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