How To Talk About Books You Haven't Read

Pierre Bayard’s article conjured up a traumatic childhood memory of mine: during a systematic interrogation of her pupil’s reading habits, my year-five teacher reduced me to tears with the question “how often do you read, Lisa?” At 11 years old, reading was synonymous with homework (which I skillfully avoided), and I hardly considered myself a ‘reader’.  But it took being humiliated in front of my peers – who’d each just boasted between and 1-2 hours of passionate nightly reading – to realise what a damning prognosis it is to be a ‘non-reader’.

This is exactly the kind of social dilemma described in Bayard’s book How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read.  In it, he charts a web of his own emotional responses – dominated by humiliation and shame  – that reveals a kind of existential angst bound within the practice of ‘non-reading’. Indeed, I find this anxiety flourishes in numerous everyday scenarios; when choosing between reading and a myriad of other mutually exclusive activities like writing, talking, eating, sleeping or breathing; when realising that the opportunity cost of opening a book is probably equivalent to a smoking a cigarette – knocking three minutes per page off your lifespan; when feeling your own sense of self and originality eroding as you ingest the works of others; or simply when – as it sometimes happens – four or more books appear together…in a pile…

I can’t help but reduce this idea into two conflicting spheres of reading: social and personal. Bayard seems to cite the social, in which books function as accessories, impressing friends with their volume and air of difficulty. As an example, if I merely skim What Maisie Knew*, and the act of reading is divorced from any sense of personal benefit and motivated entirely by avoiding humiliation during tutorials, then clearly I’m operating within Bayard’s social, performative world of books. But are we always reading for either others or ourselves, exclusively?

It similarly boils down to systematisation versus immersion.  On the microscopic end of the spectrum are the details and nuances of a book, the experience of allowing a text to become a microcosm of the whole. At the other end is a seemingly impossible mastery of that whole, a ‘science’ of books. This is epitomised by the character of the omnipresent Librarian, whose reading-abstinence exudes the kind of holier-than-thou approach of someone who might claim to have read every single book. “Anyone who lets himself go and starts reading a book is lost as a librarian,” he says, sounding like a drug dealer tempted to sample his own junk.

But is such exhaustiveness really more culturally admirable than “the accumulation of isolated bits of knowledge?” If I take a world trip on an airplane, but never actually touch down on land to become ‘lost in detail’, then isn’t that a big fat waste of a ticket?  Surely it’s more rewarding to learn 3 books by heart than know a couple of general facts about 10,000.

So how’s this for a bind: if you’re not mastering the whole (for social kudos) or submitted to squandering time actually ‘reading’ (for personal enjoyment), then you’re doomed to float in Bayard’s ‘non-reader’ limbo, where no book is ever really completed, and our experiences of them are classified into a system of plus and minus signs. (Oh God, there’s that angst again!)

However, by blurring the demarcation between ‘have read’ and ‘haven’t read’, Bayard does go some way to alleviating my ‘non-reader’ guilt, validating intellectual laziness with his schema of literary avoidance. So thank you, Bayard, for helping to repair a childhood trauma and for letting me off the book – sorry, the hook.

*(UB ++)