How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read (2007)

LITERARY LYIN'? French professor Pierre Bayard argues you don't have to read all great books to know their place in the canon

This French best-seller is less a bluffer's guide to great literature than an intellectual defense of not reading everything. It's not necessary to know the contents of any one book, Paris-based professor Pierre Bayard says, to place it in the collective library of great literature. (Why lose the forest for the trees?) In How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read, he name-checks Montaigne, Umberto Eco, and Paul Valéry, who wrote a tribute to Marcel Proust though he had ''scarcely read a single volume'' of the man's work. Likewise, you need not pore over Bayard's often circuitous prose to grasp his argument. Skim his wittily annotated table of contents instead. B