An alternate title for this book might well be "What We Talk About When We Talk About Books." According to Bayard, it turns out some of the most interesting things we say are about books we haven't read.
Bayard is out to combat a predicament that vexes book readers everywhere. You know the situation: You're at a party and someone, obviously more diligent, proclaims he or she has made it through that new translation of "War and Peace." And then the shame sets in: Even if "War and Peace" pretty much tops everyone's list of unread books, you're ashamed you haven't tackled it.
A literary Dr. Phil, Bayard wants to rid us of those bad feelings. Though it's sometimes hard to tell if he's writing with a straight face (I suspect Bayard may be winking at us all along), he calls talking about books you haven't read "an authentically creative activity."
For Bayard, reading a book in its entirety is to miss the point. He argues that reading a book word for word presents an obstacle to an important goal - the slow revelation of the self. All those words, he says, just get in the way. "It is only by maintaining a reasonable distance from the book," he declares, "that we may be able to appreciate its true meaning." (Teachers everywhere will blanch at this statement. Do students really need any more excuses to keep a reasonable distance from their books?)
As he points out, we read in all kinds of ways. We skim, we pick up bits and scraps of information from reviews, like the one you're reading right now, or from friends. It's how we use this information that matters. Invoking the likes of Paul Valery, Oscar Wilde, and Balzac, Bayard formulates an interesting theory about the ways we should approach books. For him, it's more important for us to know a given book's relationship to other books, "of being able to find your bearings within books as a system." So, if you know that "Ulysses" is a retelling of "The Odyssey," you're OK. As Bayard would have it, you can judge a book by its cover, for "even the slightest glance at a book's title or cover calls up a series of images and impressions quick to coalesce into an initial opinion."
