I really have read this book

11:47am Thursday 7th February 2008

HOW TO TALK ABOUT BOOKS YOU HAVEN'T READ

Pierre Bayard (trs. Jeffrey Mehlman) (Granta, £12)

Since every envious English Lit. tutor has already reviewed Pierre Bayard's book under the grimly-waggish heading: "I haven't read Pierre Bayard's book, but!!", I feel constrained to confess: I have read How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read. And it's brilliant. When I'm done typing, I shall re-read it.

Bayard, a psychoanalyst and professor at Paris VIII, wants to liberate us literary types from the mundane and stultifying cultural imperative to read a lot, and read thoroughly.

About time, too. I cannot think of a single reader to whom Jane Eyre, The Sun Also Rises and In Cold Blood would all appeal; and yet these books represent - as Bayard's back cover illustrates - the canon with which we all feel obliged to grapple.

Through an honesty-principle scoring system, the Professor neatly demonstrates his "break with the misrepresentation of reading". Books - some themselves fictional - are categorised according to his genuine knowledge of them: accordingly, Gibbon's French Revolution gets a UB-' (unread; moderately negative opinion).

Bayard systematically redefines what it actually means to read' a book, denouncing the stigma traditionally associated with non-reading, the "forbidden subject". Different types of non-reading (books unknown, skimmed, known only from reviews, or forgotten) will, he argues, always be part of literary life.

The Frenchman also suggests that sometimes there is little point reading properly'. When meeting an author, for example: "He expects only that, while maintaining the greatest degree of ambiguity, you will tell him that you like what he wrote."

Indeed, some non-reading is positively essential: how else (paradoxically) would we decide what not to read?

In discussing scenarios where one might have to discuss a book one hasn't read, Bayard even offers tips for doing so with dignity, and maybe even a little Gallic panache. Naturally, he does all this using the works of Wilde, Eco, Greene, Montaigne (and Zane Grey) to illustrate his point.

Below all the bluster, inevitably, How to Read Books... is a pranksterish and gleefully antagonistic homage to reading proper, and an expert demonstration that, even for professors, literature is too serious a matter to be taken too seriously.

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