To Read or Not to Read

One morning in the summer of 2009, my obliging postman carried indoors for me the box of books I’d been waiting for. Here, together with their source texts, were that year’s ten last-standing contenders for the Scott Moncrieff Prize, awarded to the best French book in English translation, which I and two colleagues were to judge.

As I unloaded the box, one title in particular jumped out at me. How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read looked very promising, 200 pages of potential mischief. This was Jeffrey Mehlman’s translation – excellent, as I’d soon be discovering – of Pierre Bayard’s Comment parler des livres que l’on n’a pas lus? (Why not that question-mark in the English title, I wondered, but quickly moved on.) Anticipating a comedy of chattering-class manners, I decided to start my judging duties here. I was hoping for a send-up of the 1980s’ Biff Kardz variety. Picture a tuxedoed matinée idol escorting a ball gowned Grace Kelly wannabe into dinner. He to her: ‘I’m working on a photonovel set at the watershed of science and desire. I call it “Diversions in Midbrain”.’ She to him: ‘Leave it out Voltaire, I’m starving.’ But on reading the jacket blurb, then the list of contents, then the first few pages, I saw that no, unless unintentionally, this book wasn’t going to be a laugh. Its author, both a practising psych- ologist and, ironically, a professor of literature, was in earnest. So I stopped smiling and read his book cover to cover. In our society, Bayard begins, to be cultured is to have to live under several internalized constraints, of which three of the most significant concern books. The first is the sheer obligation to read, reading as an act of worship, especially when it comes to canonical texts, which it’s practically forbidden not to have read if we want to be taken seriously. The second constraint is the imperative to read a book’s every word; no skimming or skipping anything, though if we do cheat we must never own up. The third: that only if and when we’ve read a given book in this uncompromised way are we entitled to talk about it with any degree of accuracy and authority. The trouble is, Bayard goes on, these constraints serve no purpose; they do nothing to make us more cultured. Therefore let’s unshackle ourselves and not feel bad about it. Bayard himself regularly manages to hold perfectly sensible conversations about books he’s not read, sometimes with people who haven’t read them either, because

being cultivated is a matter not of having read any book in particular but of being able to find your bearings within books as a system, which requires you to know that they form a system, and to be able to locate each element in relation to the others.

So, literary culture is skilful map-reading. Judge a book by its covers, almost; know where it’s shelved in what Bayard calls the ‘collective library’ we readers hold in our heads. If we follow Bayard’s lead, we’ll become guilt-free non-readers – non-reading being not simply an absence of reading, but ‘a stance in relation to the immense tide of books which protects [us] from drowning’. According to this theory of literary relativity, books are situated in one or other of the four dimensions which Bayard sets out thus: Books unknown . . .

UB Books unknown to me SB Books I have skimmed HB Books I have heard about FB Books I have forgotten

Let’s start with the UBs. There’s a character in Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities who’s in charge of his country’s national library. We might reasonably assume that librarians have at least some notion of what’s inside their books. Not this one. Admittedly, he’s responsible for a whopping three and a half million volumes. But rather than familiarize himself with a proportion of them, he remains curious about none. His reasoning? That the ingredient his job most requires is perspective, and that’s what he’d lose by prioritizing even one book over the rest. Therefore all he reads is catalogues. Well and good, but an eccentric fictional librarian overseeing several million books hardly speaks for you and me, here in the real world doing our best to broaden our minds. I warm more to Bayard’s ideas in the chapter devoted to SBs, which lauds the virtues of skim-reading. The poet Paul Valéry, Bayard informs us, was an unashamed skimmer and skipper who not only found it justifiable to write articles about books he’d merely flitted through, but sometimes wrong to do anything more than flit. I’m almost persuaded. A quotation from Oscar Wilde clinches the argument for me: ‘To know the vintage and quality of a wine one need not drink the whole cask.’ What of HBs, books we’ve only heard of? Dare we utter a word about them? Oh yes, says Bayard, and more than that, so long as we’ve imbibed what others have said about such books, we can discuss them in detail, not just in generalities. That’s the conclusion Bayard draws from Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, at whose centre is a mysterious manuscript which no one is able to investigate since its pages have been laced with poison. What those monks who give it a try can do, however, is propose (plausible) theories as to what the manuscript means. The FB category is scarcely less vexing. How can we talk at all, let alone in any detail, about books whose content we’ve forgotten? Can we claim in all honesty that we’ve read them? The essayist Michel de Montaigne found this a thorny question; but thornier still was the matter of those books we don’t even remember we have read – books we’ve forgotten we’ve forgotten, Unknown Knowns, as Donald Rumsfeld might have put it. Where is their place in our collective libraries? That summer of 2009, once we’d settled the Scott Moncrieff Prize – Bayard didn’t win – I consigned How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read to my own shelf of FBs. There it remained until recently, when I thought of it again on being told the joke about the professor who, asked if he’s read a certain tome, replies: ‘Read it? I haven’t even taught it!’ I decided to take another look at Bayard’s book, and this time that question-mark missing from its English title did bother me. Had Bayard intended it to indicate he wasn’t convinced by his own arguments? Or even that from beginning to end he’d been tongue-in cheek? So I SB-d Bayard’s book, and concluded once again that no, it wasn’t meant as a joke. But part of me wishes I’d dared give the Scott Moncrieff Prize committee my verdict without having read a word of it.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 87 © Martin Sorrell 2025