Maybe You Can Judge a Book by its Cover

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The second section describes social encounters during which it becomes essential to talk about unread books. Mr Bayard, who is a professor of French literature at the University of Paris (his book was a bestseller in France earlier this year), says airily that he must often talk about books he has at best skimmed, at worst not even opened—sometimes even with the books’ authors. Should you happen to meet the writer of a book you could be expected to have read, you might find useful the advice proffered here: “While maintaining the greatest possible degree of ambiguity...tell him that you like what he wrote.”

The third and final section contains the book’s meat: the “various means of extricating ourselves from these situations with grace”. The first requirement is a lack of shame; the second is the courage to impose one’s own ideas on books. Then there is the most radical of all: to revel in one’s freedom as a non-reader to recreate each book to one’s own ideal. In any conversation about a book, says Mr Bayard, both parties are talking about different texts, “caught up in an endless process of inventing books”. Someone who finds the courage to embrace this process will find that “in that moment, he becomes a writer himself”.

Your reviewer’s mind wandered, as she explored ways of not reading this book. Surely, she thought, books are like people, who can be unknown to us, or heard of, or “skimmed” (perhaps met) or forgotten, but never truly known? But that is to leave out love — for people and for books.