To read or not to read
How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read Pierre Bayard A psychoanalyst and a professor of French literature at the University of Paris, Bayard advances several types of non-reading and makes the case, that non-reading is far more common than reading and that in order to talk about a book there is no need of having read it. The latter third of the book proposes strategies for discussing books you haven't read. The book starts by correctly noting, that in the endless abundance of books in existence, we are destined never to read but an infinitesimal fraction of them, no matter how voracious reads we may be. Furthermore, of the books we do read, we interpret the words, not as the author intended them, but as our personal filters and prisms allow. Therefore, two people reading the same book never actually read the same book and even if we were to read a book twice, we would actually be reading a different book the second time around, because our filters have changed in the me