Were We Right or Were We Right?: Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read

-- Publishers Weekly, 11/16/2007 7:00:00 AM

All of the reviewers of Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read realize pretty quickly that there’s more to this book than what PW dubs an “at least partly tongue-in-cheek” rip at the fakery of cocktail party sophisticates.

Here is PW’s review:

Bayard (Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?), a professor of French literature at the University of Paris openly (if not entirely convincingly), confesses to having neither the time nor the inclination to do much reading. Yet he is all too aware that in his profession, one is often expected to have read the literature one is teaching or talking about with colleagues. In this extended essay, a bestseller in France, Bayard argues that the act of reading is less important than knowing the social and intellectual context of a book. He is so convinced of this that he claims there is great enjoyment-and even enlightenment-in discussing a book one has not read with someone equally unfamiliar with it. Despite appearances, Bayard's volume is not a self-help book or a bluffer's guide to great literature, but instead serves to warn people not to try to impress others with how much they have read. The truth is, most of the time they're fibbing and there are many gradations between total reading and complete nonreading, he declares, including hearing about a book, skimming it and forgetting its contents. A little too much impenetrable psychoanalytic jargon sometimes threatens to overwhelm Bayard's argument, but Bayard's at least partly tongue-in-cheek argument about not reading is well worth reading.

In the New York Times Jay McInerney notes that “reading it may remind you why you love reading.”

In USA Today, Bob Minzesheimer says the book “actually whet my appetite to read more.”

Tom Geier in Entertainment Weekly gives it a B.

The London Times Literary Supplement finds “considerable pleasure” in reading it. 

Cleveland Plain-Dealer Book Editor Karen Long finds that “Bayard skimps on the joy of the deep dive.”

A writer in the National Review says, “for those in the rising generation who still believe in art, Bayard’s prescription should be read, mused over, laughed through, and surrendered to memory’s fade.” 

And New York magazine’s Sam Anderson begins his review “without actually having read the book.”

Who got it right? Was it McInerney, Geier, Long or someone else? Who do you agree with and why? Click the "talkback" tab and let us know what you think.