How To Talk About Books You Haven't Read

There is something really tempting about assigning Pierre Bayard's How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read. Of course, we all don't really read most of the books we read. This is something any academic has to learn to survive. But it's not really talked about at the late undergraduate/early graduate level. Luckily, I had a great advisor in my master's program who worked with me on this skill, but a lot of people just had to figure it out yourself. I resisted at first, thinking this wasn't really reading. That changed after I spent my entire Thanksgiving break my first semester reading Irving Bernstein's Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker, 1933-1941, which clocks in at about 800 pages. I realized I simply could not survive without learning how to read without reading everything.

The problem with teaching this book, or the ideas within it, is that it could easily be interpreted by undergraduates as an excuse not to read at all or to just do a quick skim before class. Such an experiment could be a major disaster.

On the other hand, a lot of my students do some version of this anyway. Teaching them how to do it right could, in theory anyway, go a long ways toward creating really good discussions. Plus I think one of my jobs as a teacher is to help my students build useful skills for the rest of their lives. Given that something like 2/3 of graduates at my school go onto to some kind of advanced work, I could easily justify teaching this book as skill-building.

Still, the prospect of complete and unmitigated disaster scares me too much to probably go through with it.

Jay McInerney has an amusing review of the book here.