Talking About Books

TL;DR: It’s okay, you don’t have to.

In his book, How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, the French literature professor and psychoanalyst Pierre Bayard proposes a provocative view. He argues that you don’t have to read a book to discuss it. In fact, he argues, it may be more respectful not to read a book rather than to read it. As a writer, obviously, I have opinions.

I’ll start with several things I love about his approach. He argues that any reading is subjective. We each come to a written text with a set of expectations and experiences that shape our reading of that text. Think about books you read as a teenager and then re-read, or about that book you loved so much you recommended it to all your friends, who couldn’t understand what the fuss was about. Or the book that everyone was talking about, and then you read it, and you didn’t understand what the fuss was all about, but you felt for sure you were missing something because you’re just a country girl, so what do you know.

Another thing I love about Bayard’s approach is the freedom from reading anxiety. He makes the verifiable, accurate argument that there are just too many books for any of us to read in a single lifetime. Therefore, feeling anxious or guilty for not reading a particular book is irrational. I like this approach a lot.

Here are a few things I took issue with. First, Bayard assumes that we read books in order to be “cultured”, a term which he views from the anthropologically interesting viewpoint of a literary professor. For Bayard, we read books to locate them in the culture map or, if their location on that map clashes with our interests, to eviscerate them in critique articles. Most people I know do not, as far as I know, read books for these reasons. But I can only talk about myself, seeing as I can never really know what someone else thinks.

I read books for a lot of reasons. I read non-fiction books mostly to learn things. There are many non-fiction books out there that could have been a blog post (or, ideally, a podcast episode). But if I want to engage with a topic deeply, I usually go for a book, and even several books, to have more than one point of view. But reading fiction to understand the author’s message, for me, is like celebrating a checkmate in a game of poker. I read fiction to go with the characters on an emotional journey, to revel and luxuriate in the language, to see the world through someone else’s eyes, smell it through their nostrils. You can’t do that by reading the critique article.

Bayard’s focus on performance in literary discussions seems prophetic when we consider today’s social media landscape. Platforms like BookTok, Bookstagram, and Goodreads have created new pressures around reading as a visible, public activity. The carefully arranged ‘shelfie,’ the aesthetic flat-lay of current reads, the reading challenges and page count updates—these modern rituals often emphasize the appearance of literary engagement rather than the intimate experience of it.

What began as communities for genuine book lovers have sometimes evolved into spaces where having read the ‘right’ books in the ‘right’ quantities becomes a form of social currency. In many ways, social media has amplified precisely the kind of performative relationship with literature that Bayard describes while simultaneously increasing our anxiety about what we haven’t read as we scroll through others’ seemingly comprehensive reading lists.

Another thing I thought about while reading the book was my (offline) book club. The book club consists of mothers at the school and meets every half-term. It’s the kind of book lovers community where it’s okay to arrive at the meeting without getting to the end of the book. As Bayard points out, I found that we each get something different from the book we read. We each liked something else, went down a different rabbit hole while reading. And this is precisely the point of talking about books you’ve read. It’s to get a glimpse into other people’s reading of the book.

This brings me to the last issue I have with Bayard’s approach. As an immigrant, I learned rather quickly that I haven’t read the books that everyone has. As my second language, I read torturously slowly in English. Plus, they teach different literary works in Israel. But instead of talking about things I don’t know anything about, I developed my own approach to having a guilt-free conversation about books I haven’t read.

When someone asks me, “Have you read this book?” and I feel that pang of anxiety (I haven’t; I’m a boor, an impostor, an idiot), I let it go, and I say, “I haven’t. What is it about?” And then—and here’s my secret—I listen. I listen not to figure out what the book is about so that I can seem cultured. I listen to what the other person tells me it’s about because it tells me what they think and feel. I get to know people through the books they recommend to me.