Author: Pierre Bayard
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Our propensity to lie when we talk about books is a logical consequence of the stigma attached to non-reading,
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If we wish, then, to learn how to emerge unscathed from conversations about books we haven’t read, it will be necessary to analyze the unconscious guilt that an admission of non-reading elicits. It is to help assuage such guilt, at least in part, that is the goal of this book.
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THERE IS MORE THAN one way not to read, the most radical of which is not to open a book at all.
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the time had come to give away the ultimate secret: ‘General,’ he said, ‘if you want to know how I know about every book here, I can tell you! Because I never read any of them.’ ”
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For there is necessarily a choice to be made, given the number of books in existence, between the overall view and each individual book, and all reading is a squandering of energy in the difficult and time-consuming attempt to master the whole.
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Rather than any particular book, it is indeed these connections and correlations that should be the focus of the cultivated individual, much as a railroad switchman should focus on the relations between trains—that is, their crossings and transfers—rather than the contents of any specific convoy.
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As cultivated people know (and, to their misfortune, uncultivated people do not), culture is above all a matter of orientation.
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It is, then, hardly important if a cultivated person hasn’t read a given book, for though he has no exact knowledge of its content, he may still know its location, or in other words how it is situated in relation to other books.
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Most statements about a book are not about the book itself, despite appearances, but about the larger set of books on which our culture depends at that moment. It is that set, which I shall henceforth refer to as the collective library, that truly matters, since it is our mastery of this collective library that is at stake in all discussions about books.
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If many cultivated individuals are non-readers, and if, conversely, many nonreaders are cultivated individuals, it is because non-reading is not just the absence of reading. It is a genuine activity, one that consists of adopting a stance in relation to the immense tide of books that protects you from drowning.
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The cultivated reader will find that the orientation skills he has developed with regard to the library function just as well within a single volume.
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The work is the product of a creative process that occurs in the writer but transcends him, and it is unfair to reduce the work to that act of creation. To understand a text, therefore, there is little point in gathering information about the author, since in the final analysis he serves it only as a temporary shelter.
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Other people’s views are thus an essential prerequisite
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Other people’s views are thus an essential prerequisite to forming an opinion of your own. In fact,
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Other people’s views are thus an essential prerequisite to forming an opinion of your own. In fact, you might even be able to rely on them entirely,
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The trouble with this blind reliance on other readers is, as Valéry acknowledges, that it is then hard to comment on the text with any specificity:
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it is not at all necessary to be familiar with what you’re talking about in order to talk about it accurately.
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Valéry’s stroke of genius lies in showing that his method of non-reading is actually necessitated by the author, and that abstaining from reading Proust’s work is the greatest compliment he can give him.
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But Valéry goes further, inviting us to adapt that same attitude to each book, maintaining a broad perspective over it that works in tandem with a broad view of books as a group.
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All works by the same author present more or less perceptible similarities of structure, and beyond their manifest differences, they secretly share a common way of ordering reality.
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When we talk about books, then, to ourselves and to others, it would be more accurate to say that we are talking about our approximate recollections of books, rearranged as a function of current circumstances.
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Montaigne unhesitatingly acknowledges his difficulty in keeping track of what he has read: “And if I am a man of some reading,” he declares, “I am a man of no retentiveness.”
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Montaigne finds a solution to his memory problem through an ingenious system of notations at the end of each volume. Once forgetfulness has set in, he can use these notes to rediscover his opinion of the author and his work at the time of his original reading.
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We might use the term inner library to characterize that set of books—a subset of the collective library—around which every personality is constructed, and which then shapes each person’s individual relationship to books and to other people.
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Thus it is that in truth we never talk about a book unto itself; a whole set of books always enters the discussion through the portal of a single title, which serves as a temporary symbol for a complete conception of culture.
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For we are more than simple shelters for our inner libraries; we are the sum of these accumulated books.
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As may be seen, there is only one sensible piece of advice to give to those who find themselves having to talk to an author about one of his books without having read it: praise it without going into detail. An author does not expect a summary or a rational analysis of his book and would even prefer you not to attempt such a thing. He expects only that, while maintaining the greatest possible degree of ambiguity, you will tell him that you like what he wrote.
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As we have seen, talking about books has little to do with reading. The two activities are completely separable;
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A book is an element in the vast ensemble I have called the collective library, which we do not need to know comprehensively in order to appreciate any one of its elements
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We are never dealing with just the book in our hand, but with a set of books common to our particular culture, where any individual book in the set might be lacking. So there is no reason not to tell the truth: to acknowledge that we haven’t read some specific element in the collective library, which in no way prevents us from having an overall view of the library and remaining one of its readers.