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

have supposedly read, we must consider just what is meant by reading , a term that can refer to a variety of practices. Conversely, many books that by all appearances we haven’t read exert an influence on us nevertheless, as their reputations spread through society.
    The uncertainty of the border between reading and not reading will lead me to reflect more generally on the ways we interact with books. Thus my inquiry will not be limited to developing techniques for escaping awkward literary confrontations. By analyzing these situations, I will also attempt to articulate a genuine theory of reading—one that dispenses with our image of it as a simple, seamless process and, instead, embraces all its fault lines, deficiencies, and approximations.

    These remarks bring us logically to the organization of this book. I will begin in the first section by describing the principal kinds of non-reading—which, as we will see, goes far beyond the act of leaving a book unopened. To varying degrees, books we’ve skimmed, books we’ve heard about, and books we have forgotten also fall into the rich category that is non-reading.
    A second section will be devoted to analyzing concrete situations in which we might find ourselves talking about books we haven’t read. Life, in its cruelty, presents us with a plethora of such circumstances, and it is beyond the scope of this project to enumerate them all. But a few significant examples— sometimes borrowed, in disguised form, from my own experience—may allow us to identify some patterns that I will draw on in advancing my argument.
    The third and most important section is the one that motivated me to write this book. It consists of a series of simple recommendations gathered over a lifetime of non-reading. This advice is intended to help anyone who encounters one of these social dilemmas to resolve it as well as possible, and even to benefit from the situation, while also permitting him or her to reflect deeply on the act of reading.

    These opening remarks are intended not only to explain the general structure of this book, but also to remind us of the peculiar relation to truth that infuses all our traditional ways of referring to books. To get to the heart of things, I believe we must significantly modify how we talk about books, even the specific words we use to describe them.
    In keeping with my general thesis, which posits that the notion of the book-that-has-been-read is ambiguous, from this point forward I will indicate the extent of my personal knowledge of each book I cite, via a system of abbreviations. 1 This series of indications, which will be clarified as we go, is intended to complete those that traditionally appear in footnotes, and that are used to designate the books the author theoretically has read ( op. cit., ibid., etc.). In fact, as I will reveal through my own case, authors often refer to books of which we have only scanty knowledge, and so I will attempt to break with the misrepresentation of reading by specifying exactly what I know of each book.
    I will complement this first series of indications with a second series conveying my opinion of the books being cited, whether or not they have ever passed through my hands. 2 Since I will argue that evaluating a book does not require having read it, there is, after all, no reason for me to refrain from passing judgment on whatever works I come across, even if I have never heard of them before. 3
    This new system of notations—which I hope will one day be widely adopted—is intended as a ongoing reminder that our relation to books is not the continuous and homogeneous process that certain critics would have us imagine, nor the site of some transparent self-knowledge. Our relation to books is a shadowy space haunted by the ghosts of memory, and the real value of books lies in their ability to conjure these specters.
    1 . The four abbreviations used will be explained in the first four chapters. UB designates books