On Not Reading

To read or not to read. That is the question. Even if you don’t read a book, in no way does it prevent you from talking about it. Or if you feel obligated to skim, ten minutes might be enough. It might even be preferable for you not to read if you are a book critic. This advice sounds positively blasphemous if you love reading and talking about books. But it does come packaged in a witty and humorous book by Pierre Bayard, aptly titled How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read.

 

I’ve written about many books on this blog. I assure you I’ve read all of them. I even read most of Bayard’s but I did skip a few chapters and skimmed others. I think the author would be proud of me. On the one hand, the book made me think that literary criticism is an absolutely vacuous activity. On the other hand, Bayard emphasizes the non-static nature of a book. Read or not, it provides a jumping point to talk about opinions, ideas, musings, speculations, and engage in other human-like activities. It seems apt that books, read or unread, can promote the idealism of the humanities. Or it might just be a load of rubbish.

 

Ideas are two-faced. Janus-like. That was my biggest takeaway from Bayard’s musings. Two people can have completely different ideas when encountering some reading material, especially if they differ greatly in their backgrounds. There’s a most amusing chapter cherry-picking conversations that an anthropologist has with the Tiv tribe in Africa where she tries to tell them (or perhaps sell them) on the universal human tale of Hamlet. The Tiv may disagree with the typical literature interpretations you might encounter in a college classroom but they interact with the story nevertheless as they ridicule its tropes. I have never read Hamlet although I know enough of the story to quote from it.

 

The other interesting idea comes in the very first chapter with quotes from a book that I hadn’t heard of, The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil. In it, there is a most peculiar librarian who pointedly never reads any book in the library other the table of contents so that the book can be situated with other books it is related to. An exasperated patron wants to know why. The librarian says that were he to read the actual book, he might “lose perspective”. That sounds preposterous but it turns out the librarian in fact loves all books, so much so, that “incites him to remain prudently on their periphery, for fear that too pronounced an interest in one of them might cause him to neglect the others.” By taking a step back and having a more expansive view, it is the dynamic relationship between books that is more important than one book’s particular content. It’s holistic knowledge by taking preservation of the whole to the extreme.

 

Most books have not been read by most people. And if you do read a book, you begin to forget the moment you start reading. I find this to be more and more true as I’ve aged. I retain the gist of books, stories, TV shows, movies, but I’ve forgotten the details. If enough time has passed, I can’t even tell you the gist. I could consult my blog to reacquaint myself with what I thought of it back when I read it the first time, but a second reading might induce a different response. I’m a different person now than when I first read the book and may interact with it differently as my constellation of ideas has shifted over time. But I don’t think I will ever be like Musil’s librarian. I love the pleasure of reading a book even if it means I miss out on others. Or even re-reading. Since skimming Bayard’s book, I have a hankering to re-read the Harry Potter series. Fresh eyes might provide more fodder for my blog!