{"id":361,"date":"2017-10-29T18:53:38","date_gmt":"2017-10-29T22:53:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/?p=361"},"modified":"2021-08-18T15:19:17","modified_gmt":"2021-08-18T19:19:17","slug":"how-to-think-about-books-you-think-youve-read","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/2017\/10\/29\/how-to-think-about-books-you-think-youve-read\/","title":{"rendered":"How To Think About Books You Think You’ve Read"},"content":{"rendered":"

Pierre Bayard\u2019s How To Talk About Books You Haven\u2019t Read<\/em> argues that you don\u2019t really need to read books to understand them and that there really isn\u2019t such a thing as \u2018reading\u2019 as we think about it. He describes four different relations that you could have to a book: books you don\u2019t know, books you\u2019ve skimmed, books you\u2019ve heard of, and books you\u2019ve forgotten. Not that he doesn\u2019t include either side of the read\/haven\u2019t read binary in that list.<\/p>\n

He is, however, writing this all down in a book, and as a reader of that book, I had to ask myself the question \u201chow does the fact of a reader\u2019s consumption of his argument influence said argument?\u201d Bayard\u2019s two arguments \u2014 that you don\u2019t need to read a book to understand it and that there\u2019s no such thing as \u2018reading\u2019 as the word is traditionally defined \u2014 are influenced differently when their mode of conveyance is considered.<\/p>\n

His argument on the first point is long and complicated, relying on another argument he makes about books, as they exist in the sphere of conversation, being informed more by the opinions that are known to be held by others regarding them than they are by the actual texts of the books themselves. In the book\u2019s second section, \u201cLiterary Confrontations,\u201d he covers all the scenarios in which discussion of books can arise, and demonstrates how someone who either has only heard of a book in passing or is learning about it for the first time, can more accurately just the book than someone who\u2019s supposedly \u2018read\u2019 it. He does show that, in all those scenarios, someone can demonstrate that they\u2019ve read a book without putting in the work required to actually do so, and this is what he bases success in these scenarios on \u2014 avoiding embarrassment. After all. the book is titled How To Talk About Books You Haven\u2019t Read<\/em>, it shouldn\u2019t be surprising that it bases reading\u2019s worth on whether it improves your ability to talk about books.<\/p>\n

So, bearing in mind that the book assumes the farcical stance that reading a book is only valuable so long as it helps you avoid embarrassment, the reader\u2019s actually taking the energy to read the book becomes an extension of the joke \u2014 you don\u2019t read for the sake of others, reading is a process of personal enrichment. In this way, the book argues against one of its supposed theses, pointing out the problems with using breadth of book consumption as a status symbol within the literary community.<\/p>\n

In regards to the other half of the thesis, since by reading the book, the reader flips the book\u2019s first argument into an argument that reading is an activity motivated principally by personal enrichment, the argument that we\u2019re incapable of actually \u2018reading\u2019 a book in the way we think we\u2019re supposed to stands in stark opposition to the theory of personal gain. Bayard doesn\u2019t allow for \u2018reading,\u2019 only skimming or forgetting. This invites the reader to think back over their \u2018reading\u2019 of the book and see how accurately those descriptors apply. There were likely parts that the reader only glossed over and he likely forgot enough of the closely-read rest of the book to make that \u2018reading\u2019 indistinguishable from skimming. Even if the reader memorizes the words, Bayard argues that actual reading requires putting oneself into the gaps in the language to actually understand what\u2019s being said, and that experience of reading can\u2019t be remembered with the language.<\/p>\n

Bayard allows for the possibility that reading exists, but it surely isn\u2019t something that can be claimed when talking about a book. We can \u2018read\u2019 a finite section of a book, but after the words are even slightly in the rearview, the experience of interpreting them is so foggy that we can only rightly describe our knowledge of that experience as skimming. That\u2019s because Bayard thinks that books aren\u2019t the words on the page, but the associations derived from them, which inevitably deteriorate in time. Just as, when discussing a book, an awareness of the opinions surrounding a book are more material than the text itself, when reflecting on a book, our memory of the reading experience \u2014 which is only ever imperfect \u2014 is the only thing of actual worth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pierre Bayard\u2019s How To Talk About Books You Haven\u2019t Read argues that you don\u2019t really need to read books to understand them and that there really isn\u2019t such a thing as \u2018reading\u2019 as we think about it. He describes four different relations that you could have to a book: books you don\u2019t know, books you\u2019ve … Continue reading How To Think About Books You Think You’ve Read<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3149,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[145910,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-361","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2017-blog-posts","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/361","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3149"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=361"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/361\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=361"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=361"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=361"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}