How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read
By Pierre Bayard
Granta £12, 176 pages
FT bookshop price: £9.60

Amazon stocks more than 70,000 books with “how to” in the title. Pierre Bayard’s provocative little volume is an unlikely addition to the list. It’s not just that the activity it concerns sits strangely besides the functionality of tomes such as Paul McKenna’s How to Get Rich. What makes it unusual is that it isn’t a manual, but a witty study in the sociology of reading.

Bayard’s argument rests on the simple, undeniable observation that we talk about books we haven’t read all the time – more than we do about books we have read. His own volume is a prime example: it had become one of the most discussed books among the British literati before most people had even seen it. It is a widely unread book, in the best, active sense of the word.

Bayard’s book has been leapt upon with such enthusiasm because it dares to acknowledge what everyone knows about themselves, but fears is not true of others. Most readers harbour insecurities about the huge gaps in their personal bibliography.

Yet, as Bayard shows, reading is the least efficient or common way of acquainting ourselves with what he calls the “virtual library” of books which shape and inform cultural life.

Right now you are proving his point: most regular readers scour review sections, skipping some reviews, skimming others, and reading a minority with care and attention. Having done this, they are then armed with a good general knowledge of the week’s new releases. Yet they will usually go on to read none of them.

Often that is because they believe that the review has told them all they need to know, and Bayard would say they’d often be right. After all, how much do you even remember of books you have read? Not much more, nor less, than you could sum up in the length of a book review. Indeed, even writers can forget what they have written, as Montaigne famously admitted.

“Books I have forgotten” is one of four categories of unread books that Bayard describes. The others are “books unknown to me”, “books I have skimmed” and “books I have heard of”. Bayard creates his own shorthand notation for these, gleefully confessing in footnotes into which of these categories his examples fall.

There is a Gallic playfulness to all this, which confirms that the image of the severe Left-Bank penseur is hopelessly out of date. France is now the home of the ironic intellectual. More sober-minded Brits can struggle to get into the spirit of this kind of thing. Indeed, Bayard’s book has already been taken by some on this side of the Channel as an incitement to literary laziness. Yet if it celebrates anything it is the power of books to touch the minds of many more than the relative few who read each one.

Far from being a bluffer’s guide to all those books you’ve never got round to, this is a book for true lovers of the printed word. One day, I might even finish reading it.

Julian Baggini is author of ‘Welcome to Everytown: A Journey into the English Mind’ (Granta)