by Joe Miller,
Director of Development
What does it mean to read a book? A few weeks ago, I stumbled across a bad answer to this question, when someone on social media suggested that listening to an audiobook isn’t reading. That’s a bit silly. You can read Braille with your fingers, audiobooks with your ears and print with your eyes.
But it reminded me of a more serious analysis of what counts as reading.
That analysis is found in Pierre Bayard’s cheekily-titled How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, a book whose main argument is that not-reading is a perfectly legitimate way to approach any given book.*
That’s a pretty surprising view considering that Bayard makes his living teaching French literature at the University of Paris 8.
But it’s not a crazy idea.
Bayard suggests that there are lots of ways of not reading a book. The most obvious – and the most common – is that you have never heard of the book. There are, after all, nearly five million English-language novels, to say nothing of all the other kinds of non-novel books.
But there are other types of not-reading.
There are the books we’ve skimmed. I do this a lot with nonfiction – read the introduction, the conclusion and maybe a couple of chapters that look especially interesting.
Then there are the books we’ve heard of. I know the first line of Moby Dick. I know that it has alternating chapters, with one advancing the plot and the next describing some aspect of whaling. I know that Khan quotes Ahab’s dying words at the end of the best Star Trek movie. And I know that I’ve never read Moby Dick.
And finally, there are the books that we’ve forgotten. I took a graduate course on Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. I distinctly remember spending a solid hour discussing a single page, but I cannot remember what that page was about.
So at this point, you might find yourself saying, “this is very interesting, Joe, but why on earth are you reviewing a book about not-reading in a library column?”
It’s because Bayard offers a different way to think about our relationship to books.
Each of us has what Bayard calls an “inner library” – one that consists of books we’ve read (heard of/skimmed/forgotten). When we encounter a new book, we’re never approaching it in isolation. Instead, we’re seeing it in relation to all the other books in our inner library.
That means that were you and I to read Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, your experience of the book would be filtered through Bleak House’s relationship to all the other books you’ve read, and mine would be filtered through all the other books I’ve read.
And that, Bayard says, is how we talk about books we haven’t read. You might not have read Bleak House, but maybe you’re a big fan of legal thrillers. So when I tell you that Bleak House revolves around a tangled legal case that leaves everyone involved ruined, we could still talk about, say, how both Dickens and John Grisham use novels to spur reforms to the legal system.
Of course, you don’t have to be a snooty French literature professor – or discuss books like Bleak House – to explore connections between books. In fact, you don’t have to read (or not-read) books at all. You can equally well not-watch movies and television shows and not-listen to music.
Once you have built your inner library, you can talk about all sorts of media without having engaged with it!
Physical libraries are great resources for building up your own inner library. Obviously, we have lots of books, magazines, newspapers, movies, TV shows and music. And if you’re into digital media, a library card gets you access to a huge catalog of stuff, accessible from anywhere you can get on the Internet.
But the real superpower of libraries is the librarians who work there. After all, making connections between books (and movies and music and so on) is a big part of their job.
Maybe you mostly read biographies. Your local librarian might point you to Taylor Jenkins Reid, whose “famous women quartet” of novels are written in the style of biographies.
Or perhaps you’re into Regency romance. A librarian might introduce you to Courtney Milan, who takes very traditional Regency tropes but sets them in far-flung locales that often feature non-white protagonists.
Whatever your inner library looks like, a librarian can help you find new things that will compliment it, speak to it, challenge it—whatever it is that you’re looking to do.
So stop by your local branch. Let’s chat about books you have – or haven’t – read.
* Full disclosure: I talked about Bayard’s book for several years before I got around to reading it. I’ve since forgotten much of it, so I skimmed it as I was writing this column.