Attack of the Theater People by Marc Acito

Heh, look. Marc Acito has a new book out.

Attack of the Theater People by Marc Acito

How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read by Pierre Bayard

This book has completely changed my life! I am liberated from the constraints of my own flawed personality, my weak intellect, and time itself!

According to my records on Library Thing, I am currently in possession of 147 books that I haven't read yet. I read, on average, one book a week, so this comes to... almost three years of reading. This is, of course, assuming I don't acquire any more new books, but that is a ridiculous proposition in itself.

While this Sisyphean situation would have, at one time, depressed me beyond measure, now that I have read How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read by Pierre Bayard, it bothers me not one whit. Nor does it bother me anymore that I can't remember anything about any book I read more than two weeks ago. It's just not a problem anymore.

Pierre Bayard is a brilliant, brilliant man. How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read is not only a life-altering literary self-help book, but it is at the same time witty and irreverent, and so dead-pan funny that I want to hug it.

You don't actually need to read the book to experience it (Bayard wouldn't want you to). Reading the back cover will give you a good idea of what's inside, and you can even go so far as to read the foreword and introduction. I recommend reading the intro, looking at the charts, and skimming the rest of the book. Read this blog post, too. With all that information, you'll be well-prepared to hold your own in any conversation about it, and even recommend it to your friends.

While Bayard addresses a number of non-reading issues such as why it is better in most cases to not read and what to say to an author whose book you haven't read, he introduces one main underlying idea that is so simple yet so profound, that made the biggest impression upon me:

"It is all the more difficult to reflect on unread books and the discussions they engender because the concept of non-reading itself is 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."

For example, in my case, what if you've read a book but have completely forgotten it? What if you haven't read the whole book, but only some of it? What if you've skimmed the whole book? What if you're heard so much about it that you know it? Certainly, having heard something about a book is still more than having forgotten everything about it.

Who is to say that your non-reading or skimming of a book does not yield more insights than another's close reading of it? Because reading is not a black or white issue, there is no reason you shouldn't be able to speak intelligently about any book you have at least heard of.

This idea absolves me of the terrible inadequacy that I feel when I can't remember the details of a book. I can still act as if I do, because it's the same as talking about any other book, whether I've read it or not. I also don't have to read any of the 147 books on my shelf if I don't want to. What a liberating feeling!

I probably will keep reading all those books though, just because I like to. I'll simply tell everyone that I've read them all. They've been there so long, I practically have already.

How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read by Pierre Bayard