Examined Life

Review of Pierre Bayard, How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read

I I used to live in a small one-room apartment in Mangwon-dong. I eventually moved somewhere more spacious — two bedrooms, a proper living room — and the reason was books. The apartment was barely ten pyeong (33m²) including the loft; and yet the kitchen pantry, the built-in closets, and eventually the floor itself had all been colonized. One of the first things I did after moving was buy two large bookshelves and fill an entire wall of the dressing room. When I first set them up, about a third of the space sat empty. It didn’t last. The collection grew, books began spilling over, and then one day my parents hired movers and sent me hundreds of books from my childhood home. “Now that you’ve got the space,” they said, “take all of your books with you.” My built-in closets, TV stand, and pantry are now overflowing.

Some people ask why I don’t sell the books I’ve already read. What they don’t know is that I’ve already sold over a hundred to secondhand bookstores, and that a significant portion of those were books I never read. Others insist I should finish what I have before buying more. Whenever I’m confronted like this, I borrow a line from the author Kim Young-ha:

You don’t buy books to read them. You read books that you’ve bought.

To non-readers this sounds like a self-depracating joke. To readers, it’s simply true. The more someone reads, the less likely they are to read every book from cover to cover. At first, abandoning a book partway through produces guilt. Eventually it fades. You come to understand that reading every book thoroughly isn’t just unnecessary, but counterproductive. There are simply too many books in the world and not enough time. If a book isn’t working, the right move is to put it down and find one that is.

If a book is purchased for information rather than pleasure — though the line between the two is often murky — there’s no reason to read it straight through. Often, skimming several books with opposing viewpoints can give you a more balanced picture than reading one book carefully. This is something that comes naturally with extensive reading. The only people who ask “why do you keep buying books you don’t read?” are those who don’t read much themselves.

Behind the question is the assumption that our relationship with books divides neatly into a binary: read and unread. But reality is far more complex. Between those poles, there are countless modes of engagement. You might start a book and not finish it, read only selected passages, or encounter its arguments through a YouTube lecture or podcast. You might learn about a book through another book that cites or critiques it, or from a conversation with someone who has read it. None of this counts as “reading” in the literal sense, but it would be wrong to say you haven’t read it at all. Sometimes the person who has never opened a book but has absorbed its ideas through commentary and criticism understands it far more accurately than someone who has painstakingly read every page without the necessary context. A reader who has never touched Plato’s Republic but has worked through several serious introductions to it may grasp the argument more clearly than someone who forced themselves through the original without any preparation.

Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read is a sustained examination of these varied modes of engagement, and a dismantling of the read/unread binary. Bayard, a literature professor, opens by confessing that he has never read Proust, and that this has not prevented him from discussing Proust at length. He further notes — and rightly so — that he probably understands Proust better than most people who have read him. This will strike extensive readers as immediately relatable, and everyone else as incomprehensible. The title of this book suggests a manual for frauds. It isn’t. It is a book that makes sense only to people who have been reading for a long time.

When people see my home library, they assume I’m an avid reader. Some even introduce me as the most well-read person they know. Every time I hear this, I feel a slight twinge of guilt — because in reality, I don’t really read that much. Not, at least, if we define reading as a clean binary. I love books, but there are times when I’m too busy to open one, or when I want the information a book contains but find it too tedious to sit through, or when I simply lie in bed doomscrolling instead. I make no apologies for any of this.

And yet I can talk about books I haven’t read. When I’m invited to give opening lectures at my old university academic society, I often quote Karl Popper, despite never having read The Open Society and Its Enemies. I have a framed portrait of Bertrand Russell on my wall, but apart from his autobiography (which I recommend without reservation) and a handful of his academic papers, I haven’t read his other works. But I’ve read both in other ways: lectures, podcasts, essays, academic papers, books written about them, and critical analyses of their work.

I’ll add one more thing. I believe that simply owning books — surrounding oneself with them — is itself a meaningful form of engagement. Much more so than the mere practical convenience of having them at hand. To drive the point home, I will unapologetically quote myself. I wrote this in the essay I dubbed I Want to Write a Philosophy Book:

I love books not just for their content but for their physical presence — the texture of their covers, the feel of the pages. That’s why I buy books I may never read and stack them around me. There is something almost mystical about surrounding oneself with books. As Goethe wrote, ‘The greatest fortune for a thinking man is to explore what can be explored and to quietly revere what cannot.”

Oh, and I should probably disclose that I wrote this essay after reading only the prologue of How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read.