Read this book?

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Pierre Bayard’s ‘How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read’ (Bloomsbury: 186 pp., $19.95) comes out in the United States at the end of this month, but it’s been a hot topic in the book world for the better part of a year. In February, the New York Times called it ‘a survivor’s guide to life in the chattering classes,’ while over the summer, on the National Book Critics Circle’s blog Critical Mass, Publishers Weekly contributing editor Marcela Valdes noted: ‘I’m the kind of person who gets irritated if I find out someone’s spouting off about a book he or she hasn’t read.... Could it be that my irritation is entirely misplaced?’

I don’t know what I think of Bayard’s book because (as seems only appropriate) I haven’t read it yet. But I’m nonplused, I must admit, by the idea that the chattering classes need a survivor’s guide. At the heart of such an argument is the notion of literature as a status fetish, to which we respond out of intellectual or aesthetic insecurity rather than any abiding hunger to communicate. Maybe that’s true, but not for real readers, who are generally willing to acknowledge what they have and haven’t read. How do you learn, after all, if you can’t admit that you don’t know everything, that there are works and authors with whom you’re not yet acquainted, with whom you haven’t had the opportunity (or the inclination) to connect?

To be fair, Bayard appears to have more than that in mind. What he’s arguing against is the tyranny of the canon, the belief that certain books are better for us than others and that we can benefit from them only if we read them from beginning to end. That’s a valid point, Madeline K.B. Ross noted in April in the Harvard Crimson: ‘While I’m skeptical of the logic of a book that argues against reading ... the idea that there is a canon of great literature that one must read in order to be cultured is daunting and unrealistic.’

I agree. But if it’s the tyranny of the canon that’s the issue, why not look at it head on? Why not admit that engaged readers are always constructing their own canons, that the books that mean the most to us are generally those we discover for ourselves? Why frame reading as a parlor trick, where we learn strategies for faking it, for redirecting the conversation until it becomes a kind of game? As for me, I’d rather talk about what’s inside the books--even those I haven’t read.

David L. Ulin