Pierre Bayard has written a book called ‘How to talk about books you haven’t read’. It’s classed under humour and he spends a lot of the time in the book showing how you don’t need to read a book to know about a book or to be able to discuss it. I don’t think it was particularly funny, rather it raised some excellent points – not least that it would be impossible to ever read all the books in the world – even all the ones we are ‘supposed’ to. Instead we should start to think about reading in a new way.
From my take on it (though he did point out that once you’ve read a book you only have your flawed memory of what it was about) was that you can become aware of books in a range of ways and all are just as viable as reading it cover to cover. Even just knowing the context of a book can allow you to make a judgement without cracking the spine.
In the interests of honesty I should point out I gave up reading this book when it got to the ‘how to section’. Mainly because a skim of the book showed that I already applied most of it!
