How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read
March 2, 2008
Many people are out there writing blogs about the books they read, and I salute them for their efforts, but it occurred to me a couple of years ago that blogging about all the books I haven’t read yet would be so much easier: there are so many more of them, and they keep on coming…
Yesterday I got hold of Pierre Bayard’s
How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read
Obviously I haven’t read it yet, I’ve barely even skimmed the preface, but it’s good to see someone else trying to break the taboo about not-reading books.
In his enlightening book The Black Swan (which, of course, I haven’t finished reading yet either) Nassim Nicholas Taleb tells of how most visitors to Umberto Eco, on seeing his vast library of thirty thousand books, ask him how many of them he has read. They are missing the point, as Taleb puts it: books are a research tool. “Read books,” he says, “are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means [...] allow you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly.”
Indeed they do. I’m surrounded by hundreds of them. It can’t be helped though. It doesn’t matter how many books you do read, the number you discover that you haven’t read will always increase at a much faster rate, it’s inevitable. As Bayard says on page six (yes, I have at least got that far) of How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read:
”This encounter with the infinity of available books offers a certain encouragement not to read at all. Faced with a quantity of books so vast that nearly all of them must remain unknown, how can we escape the conclusion that even a lifetime of reading is utterly in vain?”
A better conclusion, as Bayard explains, is that we must learn to appreciate books even if we haven’t actually read them.
