Backlisted - How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read by Pierre Bayard

Episode Date: August 6, 2018

For the first of three episodes recorded at this year's Port Eliot festival in Cornwall, John and Andy are joined by author Cathy Rentzenbrink and actor and writer Ben Moor to talk about Pierre Bayard's How To Talk About Books You Haven't Read. Three members of the panel have read the book and one hasn't - join the audience in trying to work out who is dissembling (and whether it matters).Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)7'06 - How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read by Pierre Bayard* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Some wine? Yes. Get almost, almost anything delivered with Uber Eats. Order now. Alcohol in select markets. See app for details. Hello and welcome to Backlist, the podcast that gives new life to old books. Today you find us returning to the Bowling Green stage

at the Paul Telly Festival, one of the UK's best-loved celebrations of books, music, food, literature, orgasmic yoga, anything that you want. Everything is here. We are sitting here with our faces painted with glitter, our bodies robed in gaudy fabrics, and our hands still dripping from the £10 lobster roll we had at lunch. £10!

I'm John Mitchinson. I'm the publisher of the crowdfunding publisher Unbound, a place where people go to crowdfund the books they really want to read. My name's Andy Miller. I'm the author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. I'm very pleased to be back at Port Elliot, and I'm very pleased to be back on the Bowling Green stage. I absolutely love this space and this festival.

We are very pleased to be joined today by, on my left, Ben Moore, who is a writer, performer, and he did a show at Port Elliot last year called Pronoun Trouble. Did anybody see that show? It is the best show I've ever seen at Port Elliot. It was so brilliant, so I'm so honoured that Ben has joined us today. And also, in that show, you might remember, he references the book we're talking about today,

How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read by Pierre Bayard. So it seemed very fitting that Ben would be here to do that. And welcome back, Kathy Rensenbrink. Kathy Rensenbrink is the best-selling author of The Last Act of Love and A Manual for Heartache, and she is currently working on a novel and a book about books. Love and a manual for heartache and she is currently working on a novel and a book about books. She's also, as several of us on the stage are, a former bookseller, which we will talk about the experience of how and why you have to lie about books when you're a bookseller. I'm sorry if any of us told you the truth at any point. She was a backlisted guest for

us last year to talk about the novel Venetia by Georgette Heyer. And you live down here now, Cathy, don't you? I do. I've come back to my Cornish roots. It's very nice. I recommend it. So we're going to be talking about a book called How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read. And before we start, I'm going to tell you two things. The first thing, I want to just position the book. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to ask you a few simple questions, and I just need to have a show of hands. How many people in this tent at Port Elliot have read the novel Moby Dick by Herman Melville? I reckon that's about 15%. How many people in this tent at Port Elliot can name a character from the novel Moby Dick and I will allow any whales that you can think of?

That's very good. I would say that's about 60% of you could name a character from Moby Dick. My third question, how many people think they could quote me the opening line of Moby Dick whether they've read the book or not? I reckon that's about 40%. The opening line is call me Ishmael. I have read Moby Dick.

How many people who have read Moby Dick could quote the second line of Moby Dick? None. And it's in that gap that we will be operating today. I have read Moby Dick. I could quote the first line of Moby Dick, call me Ishmael, as could so most of this tent who haven't read Moby Dick. I could not remember the second line even though I've read it. And that's one of the things... Me neither, and I've read it, and I was tempted to go and check,

but I thought that would be cheating. But cheating is what we're here to talk about. So all four of us have read this book for this discussion. Well, that's not quite true. Three of us have read the book, and one of us hasn't. Your job is to choose to accept this onerous task. we will take a vote at the end of the podcast and we will determine which member of this panel you think has not read the book they have been talking about for an hour. Okay, so pay attention, there may be clues.

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I shall now return you to the tent. Right. At this point, I normally turn to Andy and say, Andy, what have you been reading? But that seems inappropriate for this specific podcast, but also we're doing this at the Bowling Green every day at one o'clock. So I thought a better question would be, what have you seen or what are you planning to see at the Port Elliot Festival, Andy?

I'm going to see our former colleague Matthew Clayton, who used to be on Backlist, caught by the river. I think that is tomorrow, Saturday. And then I'm going to go and see Viv Albertine talking to Adele Stripe. Viv Albertine's new book is brilliant. I haven't read it. John, what are you going to go and see? I've got so many.

I'm going to stay in this tent, I think, to see Russell Norman interviewing the great Grace Dent, food critic, and Roley Lee, who I publish and who failed to tell me that he was coming to the festival. I don't know if we've even got books there for him, but that will be

fun. It's a conversation on food. There are so many things. Tishani Doshi, Indian poet, who's on here later on today. I'm going to go and see Ben play frisbee golf. Any of you who want to add a new sport to your lives, frisbee golf. The orgasmic yoga I think you were talking about. You're doing that as a tourist trip. What else?

Lit Witcher, Literary Tarot Consultancy. I'm just going to be prepping the next one of these for tomorrow. We'll be back in just a minute.

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and the US. Cheers to taking off this summer. More details at aircanada.com. As we'll discover, Andy, we don't need to prep anymore. We don't, you're right. That's the whole thing. How to talk about books you haven't read. Ben Moore, you chose this book for us to talk about

at Portelia. When did you first encounter this book or read this book? Well, I know that because I always use as a bookmark something relevant at the time, like a receipt for a theatre ticket or something like that. So I actually know that I read it in September 2011 because I have my check-in pass from Delta Airlines leaving Heathrow, going to New York Kennedy Airport on the 8th of September 2011. I was going to a hipster wedding in Brooklyn. And it was amazing. It was a brilliant wedding. It was so cool. So I read it.

This sounds so implausible already. Well done. Right. Well, good. Totally true. Yeah. And, you know, that's the answer to that question. And what did you like about it when you read it? And why did you put it in your show, Pronoun Trouble? So in Pronoun Trouble, I go through... The show Pronoun Trouble is partly a lecture

about the cartoons of Chuck Jones, specifically three cartoons, the hunting trilogy, Duck Season, Rabbit Season. And I have a section where I talk about some of the books that Chuck Jones wrote, specifically Chuck Muck, which is his autobiography. But then I go through tons of other books about cartoons. And then I recommend some books that I have at home that I would insist people read, one of which was the Pierre Bayard. And, you know, I flicked through the slideshow, because it's not just the title.

The title makes you laugh anyway. But when you actually read the book, there's so many great ideas about the inner library, the collective library, the virtual library, and stuff that you've never actually articulated yourself that is put down by a French philosopher who's incredibly clever and funny. I mean, he's a professor of literature.

It's quite a brave book to publish if your actual job is talking about books. Indeed. But that's where the authority of the text comes from, isn't it? He says, I do this for a living, so if I can do it, anybody can do it. And the whole tone of the book is, come on in, the water's lovely. Once you stop lying. He says this at the beginning. These are the very first words of the book. Born into a milieu where reading was rare, deriving little pleasure from the activity, and lacking in any case the time to devote myself to it, I have often found myself in

the delicate situation of having to express my thoughts on books I haven't read. Because I teach literature at the university level, there is in fact no way to avoid commenting on books that most of the time I haven't even opened. I guess if you don't find that, the thing with a book like this is if you don't find that funny, unfortunately that got a joyous laugh, then you're going to be quite stuck for 170 pages kathy did you you when did you read this book did you like it so i read it three weeks ago but i will have read a bit of it when i was a bookseller when it came out because the new books would come in on the trolley and i will have read i would have read standing up i'll have looked in it flicked through done that slightly magic thing you do as a professional reader,

where somehow you manage to absorb it. So I'll have read a bit of it then. And I do like it. It's very French, so you might think that's a good thing or a bad thing. It's very French, but that was a good, I mean, reading the first paragraph was a good thing. If you liked that, read the book. If you didn't like that, you're not going going to like this book so that is actually a quick way to find out whether this book is for you and also you'll still be able to talk about it because you've been listening to us talking about it for an hour it's a win-win situation read it or don't read but he's he's very very charming isn't he i mean well we've got we've got a clip of bay are we've got a couple of clips about this

is a clip of bay are um who doesn't Bayard who doesn't speak very good English, everybody. What a thrilling moment to play a non-English speaker faltering through. Presumably he feels he doesn't need to be able to speak good English because people will just understand him. So here he is talking 10 years ago about why he wrote the book. I was surprised to see that there was no book about this very common situation. We know very often and when we are intellectuals this situation is quotidian, the situation of having to speak about books you have not read. And there is no book about it. You have books about everything,

about improving your English, I should have read it, about taking care of your garden or how to kill your wife and so on, but no one's book about this common situation of having to speak about books you have not read. I was surprised that in France when the book was published, many people, many booksellers, you see,

came to me and they told me, thank you, because they have this kind of problem. They told me I begin at 9 o'clock and at 7 I don't have time to read just a few books a year. And each day people come to me and ask advices about books. And after having read this book, they are able to answer precisely. So when the book was published, He was praised by booksellers. He says, thank you, thank you.

This has expanded my portfolio of fibbing. Cathy, you were a bookseller. What did you do in these scenarios? Well, this is honestly the truth. And if you knew me, you would know that I don't really like telling lies, especially as my memory goes, because then you can't remember and it's just awful but generally I don't actually lie about whether or not I've read a book

in fact slightly the opposite sometimes I say I haven't read something when I have because I didn't like it I don't want to sag it off because there is a special place waiting in the afterworld for people that are mean about other people's books so sometimes I say I haven't read things when I have but there are all sorts of ways in which when in a bookshop somebody says to you,

have you read this? And you say, you politely say something like, oh, I haven't got round to it yet, but it was reviewed excellently in the Sunday Times this week. And that often makes someone read the book. But mainly I just read loads of books because I liked reading loads of books. My favourite formulation for this, which the Irish writer Colm Torbjorn uses, he said, when asked, have you read it, he said, yes, but not personally. And that's a big point of Bayard's in this book, is that where consensus kind of substitutes for personal opinion. It's kind of, you feel you've done everything.

And it's basically because his idea of what the book is, substitutes for personal opinion. It's kind of, you feel you've done everything. And it's basically because his idea of what the book is is kind of interesting, very French. You know, the book isn't what we think it is. It isn't what the author's trying to express. It's not the text. It's all the relationships. It's basically our reading of a book. And this is not a new idea.

T.S. Eliot always said that a great poem was a collaboration between the writer and the reader, that what makes the poem isn't what the intention of the writer, it's in some space. And so the book is kind of about what we bring to it. And our inner library, the inner library that we have inside us is full of books that may have actually glancingly little to do with the actual books themselves, but it's our responses to them. It's kind of interesting. Going back to Cathy's experience as a bookseller, I was a bookseller about 20 years ago,

and I wrote a little bit about the experience in this book, The Year of Reading Dangerously. I'm just going to read one paragraph because it seems... I took a totally different line, right? I lied my backside off because it, to me, seemed like good customer service. If a customer came in and said, have you read this, is it good?

If you had read it and it wasn't good, they didn't want to hear that. I once had a woman come in and say have you it's this good captain corelli's no not captain gregory mandolin um the english patient by michael and archie i went no it's awful because i'd read it and it is the golden book another customer came up and disagreed with me and said don't listen to this man don't listen to this man and then she looked at me and said, yes, I grant you, it's not a thriller. So this is what I wrote.

I said, no, it was much better to conceal what you really thought. How much simpler has yet another copy of The English Patient or Captain Corelli's Mandolin or The Secret History passed through your hands to go with the flow of received opinion? Yes, it is an excellent book. Well done you for selecting it. A distinctive choice. In the era I worked in the shop, it sometimes felt like the only books we ever sold were the same half dozen novels over and over again. Captain's Corelli's Mandalorian, Secret History, Perfume, Birdsong. I personally recommended these titles hundreds of times, though I had only read one of them and not thought much of it.

But these were the books that people wanted, even when they didn't know they wanted them. A customer would come in and say, I'm looking for a new novel. I can't remember the title. I heard something about it on Radio 4. Was it Captain Commander Commander? Yes, it was.

How did you... Are you a mind reader? Footnotes. For more on this topic, Pierre Bale's How To Talk About Books You Haven't Read is warmly recommended. Ah. NB, I haven't read it.

So, Ben, you spent years trying to get... Can I just say, though, because of all of that, I know that you were a massive pain in the arse in the staff room, but you continually moaned about the customers and thought you knew better than any of them about what they should be reading. Just telling it like it is, Redfin. Just reporting the facts as I saw them.

I worked briefly in the books department of a department store in Canterbury in the 1980s. Did you? Mainly so I could use the BBIP microfiche. Yeah. I mean, nowadays you just bring everything up, but that was so exciting.

Who here doesn't know what a microfiche is? Oh, only three people. Wow. Three people, one of whom is our producer that's good to know ben you tried to get me to read this book for years yeah but then because i knew you were writing that yeah and you know we were saying it so you sort of had you try not to read things that are in the same disease environment. Disease environment?

Ecology. You don't want an inoculation. You want to keep your work pure and uninfected by something else. I mean, they do share similar themes. But you've done, Andy, you've done what Bayard, you've absolutely kept to the Bayard programme. You've made this book part of your autobiography. There's a great chapter towards the end where he quotes Oscar Wilde.

Oscar Wilde said, I never read a book. In fact, it's the dedication to the book, isn't it? I never read a book I'm going to review. I find it prejudices me so. But what you've done is you've taken Bayard and you've kind of woven it into your own mythology, your own journey to truth, Andy. Tell us about the moment of truth.

Well, OK, so I haven't lied about having read a book since 2005. I'm Andy Miller, I'm a bookaholic. Although that isn't true, I have lied about this There's one book that I have lied about having read But I won't tell anyone ever what it was Because that would be Not the Dan Brown No, I've read that

From cover to cover It's a little reader there, I was just getting nervous I realised that The stuff that you heard me read out About there, fibbing about I wasn't really seeking to deceive anybody. I just loved books so much that I wanted to own that knowledge of books. I wanted to own that in every book.

I wanted to know about every book. So I took shortcuts. It's more that. I realised that I needed to stop doing that. In a sense, one of the things that How To Talk About Books You Haven't Read is about is freeing yourself from feeling you have to have cultural omnipotence. You know, we live in an era where you are encouraged to have quick opinions about everything, to stick them on social media and to be across, And to not know just the first line of Moby Dick, but also the second.

But that's his big point, isn't it? And that stops you reading. Because he's a psychoanalyst, of course. He's a professor of literature and a psychoanalyst. He says that freedom from cultural... That cultural pressure is the same as what a psychoanalysis does, frees us from our own... You know from the psychological and emotional burdens that we have, and that those two burdens are kind of aligned.

So it's a sort of therapeutic book. But he is, there's a very interesting review of it by Hilary Mantel, who kind of, everybody, the reviews are all broadly positive, but she, with a kind of slightly icy kind of English dose of common sense, says, it's charming, but it's very French. And he said, you know, the idea that people in France show off to one another about how much they've read wouldn't really cut it in England.

We're far more likely to say, you know, boast about how little we've read, you know. Or, do I know you? Are you a writer? Well, I don't really read. My my wife reads will she have heard of you no that kind of that's literally that's literally the conversation she's got he's got a line in here just one line about um in the chapter encounters in society about events like this one about book festivals he says in a lecture, a writer who has not read the books on which he is expected to speak confronts an audience that has not read those he has written. We have before us a perfect example of what is conventionally called a dialogue of the deaf.

So, Ben, would you be kind enough to... You select a little bit to read from the book for us. This bit from the beginning, this section here. OK, so this is from the section called Books You Don't Know. Most statements about a book are not about the book itself, despite appearances, but about the larger set of books on which our culture depends at that moment. It is that set, which I shall henceforth refer to as the collective library, that truly matters, since it is our mastery of this collective

library that's at stake in all discussions about books. But this mastery is a command of relations, not of any book in isolation, and it easily accommodates ignorance of a larger part of the whole. It can be argued, then, that a book stops being unknown as soon as it enters our perceptual field, and that to know almost nothing about it should be no obstacle to imagining or discussing it. To a cultivated or curious person, even the slightest glance at a book's title or cover calls up a series of images and impressions quick to coalesce into an initial opinion, facilitated by the whole set of books represented in the culture at large. For the non-reader, therefore, even the most fleeting encounter with a book may be the beginning of an authentic personal appropriation,

and any unknown book we come across becomes a known book in that instant. You know what? I'm looking at the faces of the audience and it's a mixture of people nodding or with their eyes closed, wishing they voted Brexit. But I think books, so your point about culture and books,

books have this very visible, we see people reading them. we have shelves in our home, we have these buildings everywhere full of books that we can take out and return if we don't like. But they have a weight and they also have a velocity in culture as well because the current book, you know, as you say, everyone's reading Captain Corelli or, you know. The Essex Serpent.

Yeah. But compared to music or art, I mean, music and art are slightly different experiences in terms of the culture. But a book, you know, you can look in a bookshop and look at the table at the front and see, oh, do I get it today or do I wait or don't get it another time? Or is it a gift? You know, Cathy, you were saying that you don't tell lies about books

and you said you'd had an experience early in your career. I tell you what, I witnessed a shocker, right? So one of the nice things about... Well, being a bookseller is nice in lots and lots of ways. You don't get paid very much money. But what certainly used to happen when I was a bookseller in London was that publishers would invite you to publicity things for their authors. And partly because you didn't get paid very money.

You'd often be like a bit hungry. So you'd then very quickly eat all the food and get really drunk. And occasionally make a bit of a fool of yourself and fall down the stairs and snog an author at the bar and stuff. Not that I personally ever did that, you understand. and stuff not that I personally ever did that you understand but um but what I once witnessed was and and sometimes again I really did try to only go to events of books that I was actually interested in but not everybody had that responsible approach lots of booksellers would just go anywhere for the free drink and would actually be quite rude about trying to like work at how they could go to the bog during the speeches so they didn't have to give any mental time to what we were supposed to be celebrating

and we're just hoovering up the free food and drink and what I witnessed this was truly awful there was a book it had a very bright upbeat lovely cover it was like it looked like a nice social comedy it was a memoir it was about someone who unexpectedly found themselves in the position of having to look after a family member, and then how funny and wonderful that was. I had read this book to the end. About seven-eighths of the way through this book, it takes an incredibly different, darker turn. At the launch for this book, I watched someone who clearly hadn't read this book, but who just looked at the cover and thought they knew what this book was, talking to the author.

And the author becoming gradually aware that the person talking to them didn't know that in the end of this book, the author reveals his sudden and surprising HIV diagnosis. And realizing that the two people having this conversation, the author not knowing that booksellers regularly don't read the books of the parties that they go to, and the bookseller just thinking it's a book with a turquoise and pink cover, what bad things can happen in it, and just seeing this terrible situation, and not helped by the fact that they were also a bit drunk on the free drink because they were probably a bit hungry because it was near payday.

And I observed all of this and I thought, I will never be in that situation. I will never not know something about someone that they have put in a book and then be drunkenly opining to them about how hilarious I think their book is when they clearly are having... They keep wondering when I'm going to say, oh, and I'm sorry about the bit at the end.

It never came. I once congratulated the late Iris Murdoch on her reading when she hadn't actually gone on yet. But, you know, again, customer service. I mean, it's very... When you become a publisher, you know, again, customer service. I mean, it's very... When you become a publisher, I think you kind of really do... You have to... Maybe you disagree, Andy, but I once sort of gave out to an author that I'd read the book.

Not, you know, in a sort of phatic community. Bayard would be, well, on my side, I talked about it in a kind of breezy, you know, yeah, great, I think we can really do good stuff with it. And he just, this American writer just looked me in the eyes, locked my... said, have you actually read it? And I just... No. Oh!

No, I haven't, I'm sorry, I've started it. He said, have you? No, I haven't started it. Well, I've started it. He said, have you? No, I haven't. Well, I'm going to, I'm going to this evening. He said, I just want to be clear, OK? Because if you haven't, fine. But, you know, we haven't really got much to talk about. OK, fine.

So, you know, I think that kind of, you know, you remember, I'm still shaking slightly remembering that. I won't tell you who the author was, but it was ugly. But then, you know, the flip side of that is, as Bayard talks about this, one of the things that Bayard talks about is fooling yourself that if you have, technically speaking, read a book, that you've read the book.

So, like, I can say I've read Tristram Shandy. What does that mean? I read it when I was 19 at university. So A, I was too young to understand it. B, it was 31 years ago, so I can't remember any of it. Even as I was reading it, Bayard suggests, I was forgetting it. So the difference between... This is the sort of brilliantly

to me, very funny and yet truthful Frenchness of the book, is in saying, even as you read you're fooling yourself that you have control over what you're reading. You don't. The thing is slipping out of your grind. You barely remember plots. I mean,

it's like, you know, that you think you have a vague notion. I mean, remember's like, you know, that you think you have a vague notion. I mean, remember rereading and loving Great Expectations. It was like, A, it was a completely different book to the one I'd read. And there were, I mean, they're just, I've got whole bits. I'd imported characters from other Dickens novels. I'd done all, my memories of the book were completely not what the book was. Have you read, there's a brilliant book by Nicholson Baker called You and I, about John Updike, where he sets out to write a book about John Updike. Who's in my notes?

Is it in your notes? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry, Ben. I haven't read it. But I know about it. We're in conversation, yeah. He sets out to write a book about John Updike, who he says he loves.

He sets out to write it from a position of doing no research. He says, I'm just sitting on the sofa at home, and I think to myself, you know what I'd like to write a book about next? John Updike. God, I love John Updike. There's that book he wrote, Rabbit Thing. I'm going to write about that. And he says, but I'm not going to look anything up.

I'm going to talk about passages and events, and then at the end of the book, I'm going to go through and annotate for you, the reader, whether I was right or not. And as he goes through, he goes, not only is he misquoting, he goes, this wasn't John Updike, this was Anne Tyler. But Bayard does that in a slightly cheeky way, doesn't he? He actually deliberately invents bits from various classic books to catch the reader out. Although I think a lot of the criticism,

I mean, it really fucks with your head because you don't know, is that, there's quite a lot about Graham Greene in the book and I'm thinking, is that, do I remember that or have I forgotten it or have I in fact read that book? And there's obscure French writers as well that you assume are totally true. There was one section where a French intellectual is giving a tribute

to another French intellectual and he's just saying pablum, he's saying placebo words. Clearly because these probably apply to this other French intellectual because they would, without necessarily saying anything specific. We have another clip coming up here. Bayard has a theory about why you can't lay a glove on him. Anything he says in his books, he says, it's fine for me to say it.

He talks a bit about who actually writes his books. My books are not written by myself. My books are written by a kind of narrator, you see, a character who explains his positions. And I don't, this character is not me, it's a part of me. If you are a novelist and you create a murderer, when you create a murderer, you are not this murderer, but this murderer is a part of you, you see. It's exactly what I try to practice in my books. When you create a murderer, you are not this murderer, but this murderer is a part of you, you see. It's exactly what I try to practice in my books. All my books are written by a kind of paranoiac narrator.

But, of course, I am not this paranoiac narrator. I am not completely this paranoiac narrator. And in France, there were misunderstandings because some journalists did not perceive the fact and the theory was inside fiction. I feel angry about people who are not able to distinguish levels of language and to see the humorous part in a book, you see. So it explains the differences. Of course there are differences because there are many Pierre Bayard in the books. More than two. I think that's brilliant.

That's like a stand-up comedian creating a stand-up persona. Absolutely. And being slightly different offstage, but the audience knowing one aspect. And Michel Welbeck does it as well in some of his non-fiction pieces. And in Mapping the Territory, there's a character there's Michelle Welbeck, the author. It's what the comedian

Stuart Lee does, which is he will say, now, that is a joke, but coincidentally it is also what I think. It sounded a bit weaselly and after the fact to me, a little bit like, oh, these people keep telling me things now, I'm just going to say that they're not allowed to say it because I thought this all through in advance, honest garb.

And actually, it's just my miniature Bayard, and I can say what I like, which, I mean, I think I'm going to channel more Bayard in future interviews. It's just miniature Cathy Rensselbrink. Nothing to do with me. If you don't like that thing I did in chapter nine, okay. Do you want to read a bit more, Kathy? I think it's fun to have more of the man paying

out the rope that we can hang in with. So I liked the book, but the second half for me was where it really umphed off and got going. So, the most common literary confrontations are those that occur in our social lives, and of these, the most vexing are those in which we're expected to express ourselves in front of a group. On such occasions, the conversation may turn to a book we have not read, if the book in question is assumed to be known by all cultivated individuals or if we make the error of blurting out that we have read it we may find ourselves forced to try to save face. This is an unpleasant situation no doubt but with a little finesse we may extricate ourselves from it at no great cost by changing the subject. But it's easy to imagine such a situation turning into a nightmare, in which the person

being forced to speak about a book he hasn't read is subjected to the rapt attention of an entire audience eager to know his thoughts. Such circumstances bring to mind what Freud calls the examination dream, in which the terrified dreamer imagines himself summoned to an exam for which he is not prepared prepared and which calls back to consciousness a whole series of buried childhood fears. So I picked that bit because I have the examination dream all the time. And it's often French, which I used to be able to speak,

and now I'm a bit rusty about. It's often that I have to write a paper about a book that I haven't read. And I did actually have an anxiety dream about this event and not reading this book. Double bluff. And when I was a bookseller, I used to have anxiety dreams about book events. And once we were having an event at Harrods,

I used to look after the events, and we were having John Simpson come to do an event. And I dreamt the night before that I went into the goods-in room, all these piles of books, and Kate Adie was sitting on the piles of books saying, you've ordered the wrong bloody book! Then as my book career progressed, and I wasn't just the person in charge of the stock anymore, the dreams morphed and changed. And now I have anxiety dreams about mispronouncing

authors' names, realizing I haven't, you know, it might be a panel and I haven't read any of the books and I don't know who any of the people are. So I think that's why I don't lie, because it would cause me such, and actually it would genuinely cause me like actual anxiety. The thought of it is kind of slightly making me start to palpitate and feel nervous. I just wouldn't be able to cope. I can't cope with life as it is. I wouldn't be able to cope with life if I was also not telling the truth. That's a pretty persuasive slam dunk to you, the audience, right?

She's good. One of the things that's great in the book is I really love he's got little codes for the books. There's UB, book unknown to me. So he's trying to SB, book I've skimmed. HB, book I've heard about. FB, book I've forgotten. And then two pluses, extremely positive opinion. One cross, positive opinion. One minus, negative opinion. And two minuses, extremely negative opinion. And there's a brilliant bit that in her review, Hilary mantel says i won't try and do her voice but she said i was soothed to find steppenwolf marked sb which is remember what sb is god you see i've forgotten already book i've book i've skimmed fb minus which is uh, I've forgotten already. Book I've skimmed, FB minus,

which is Book I've Forgotten, Negative Opinion. Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse. Undergrads always had it as an ornament, rather as Edwardian aunts had cake stands, and I've never seen a copy that wasn't plumped out with dust. Which is quite... And then that made me think of the brilliant passage, which I'll read a little bit of,

in Italo Calvino's If On A Winter Night A Traveller, where he goes through lists of books on his shelves. It's a bookshop past the thick barricade of books you haven't read which are frowning at you from the tables and shelves trying to cow you. But you know you must never allow yourself to be awed that among them extend for acres and acres the books you needn't read, the books made for purposes other than reading, books read even before you open them

since they belong to the category of books read before being written. And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts and then you're attacked by the infantry of books that if you had more than one life you would almost certainly have read but unfortunately your days are numbered. With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of books you mean to read but there are others you must read first. The book's too expensive now and you'll wait till they're remained. The books ditto when they come out in paperback. Books you can borrow from somebody. Books that everybody's read, so it's as if you had read them too. Eluding these assaults, you come up beneath the towers of the fortress where other books have been holding out. The

books you've been planning to read for ages. The books you've been hunting for years without success. The books dealing with something you're working on at the moment. The books you want to own so they'll be handy just in case. The books you could put aside maybe to read this summer. The books you need to go with, other books on your shelves. The books that fill you with sudden, inexplicable curiosity, not easily justified. Wow. It's really good.

I was wondering whether Bayard had had a, you know, whether his slightly kind of Frenchy intellectual had any kind of impact on literature, and I was thinking that definitely, but also maybe Roland Barthes, his famous SZ, where he takes a single story, a Saracen by Balzac,

and then the book is just, he just totally disentangles every single sentence. And all the things about relations and how books are more than the sum of the parts or the sum of the words or the sum of the intentions. It's kind of brilliant,

bravura, French bollocks. You know what? I'm going to come back. No, I'm going to come back on this. I will not run down the French because they are magnificent people who I love. And some of my favourite authors are French. And I found this book...

Actually, there is a serious point to the book, which is to liberate yourself. Funnily enough, it's about how to talk about books you haven't read. It's actually a book about reading. It's a book about why you should read rather than talk about reading, ironically in the light of why we are all gathered here today. But nonetheless, I found it quite liberating to read. What did you think, Ben?

I agree. All right. No, it does, but it does make you want to look? I agree. All right. Yeah. No, it does. But it does make you want to look up especially the books he quotes because he summarises, he praises some of them, little adventures of writers who've submitted a different book than someone else has rewritten over the course of the book. They sound like really good books to read,

so I'm going to look those up. He said in a different interview, I don't have audio of it, but he said in a different interview, you know, people are cross with me for writing about not reading books. Do you know how many books I had to read to write this book? I'm just going to say... May I be serious for un petit moment?

So if I'm going to be serious for un petit moment, one of the reasons why I don't lie about what I've read is I genuinely think it's very damaging to people that might want to read when there seems to be this weight of expectation that you have to have read everything. And because I did used to run a literacy charity and my dad couldn't read until he was in his 30s, and I spent lots of time with people who genuinely can't read.

And part of the thing that puts them off is because they think they have to read everything all at the same time and know it. So every time, seriously, when you say, I haven't read that, when you say, I couldn't get into that, you are doing a beautiful human act. And that is the serious thing. We really are. And I find it, I mean, I only read books.

I don't have any hobbies, and I have no cultural apparatus outside of reading books. Front Row asked me to go on a Christmas quiz about all art forms. And I just had to admit that if it's not just books, I just can't do it. But one of the things, whenever I think I'd like to know about music, I'd like to know about art, maybe I'll try to do something. Whenever I try to engage, I am slightly put off by the weight of people slagging everything off that everybody likes. I genuinely don't know where to start. I don't know what to do. I don't know how

to do it. I mean, I just walk into a gallery and look at some pictures. But I think all of this is actually true with reading. Cathy, you were saying to me earlier, Pierre Bayard, he's written about 20 books, and about four or five of them have been translated into English. I've got. He's got a particular

line in, so here's a book in French called Enquête sur Hamlet, an inquiry into Hamlet. And in this book, he proves beyond reasonable doubt that the man who murdered Hamlet's father is not Claudius, as Shakespeare would have you believe, but Hamlet. He's got a book called Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong, reopening the case of the Hound of the Baskervilles. Yes, everyone, Conan Doyle and Holmes got it wrong. And he's also written a book, and Cathy, Ben and you both love this book. Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? About the murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie, in which he proves beyond reasonable doubt that Agatha Christie got it wrong.

Now, you both read this book as well, didn't you? You loved this, didn't you? Well, I am, because I'm completely obsessed with Agatha Christie got it wrong. Now, you both read this book as well, didn't you? You loved this, didn't you? Well, I am, because I'm completely obsessed with Agatha Christie as well, and I love The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. And so this book was... I mean, really, if you want to give yourself a treat, just turn off the world for a week, get The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, if you haven't already, and that,

and just, like, go into your own little world with it. It's just unbelievably unbelievably unspeakably good fun to to look at them both together i do i mean i love that i love phantom books i love those literary puzzle books the john sutherland ones all that sort of stuff i'm endlessly obsessed by those i did actually in my last book introduce a couple of slight things, just hoping someone might notice. Little inconsistencies, little things that I popped in there. Because I think that... Bayard talks about phantom books.

I love fictional books. I love fictional novels. One of my favourite novels is called The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield, which has this whole... There's an author who's written books, there's a missing story. I love all of that. The whole thing about, I like books about books

and books about writing. And then How To Talk About Places You've Never Been, which is the other one, which has been translated into English as well. Yeah. About imaginary places, about lying, about going to places, about, you know, planning about... It's a great... I mean, you know, without laying the Frenchness aside,

I mean, that whole movement, which now does get often unfairly lampooned, structuralism, post-structuralism, but it did radically alter the way people were able... It gave people permission to read books in different ways. It gave people permission to disagree with the authors. What you can read, I think, this book, is an amazing defence of the imagination

and of the emotional truth that everybody brings to their own reading. It doesn't really matter if it's not what the author intended or it's not even what... It's why we find criticism often so, as you're saying, sort of off-putting, because it's kind of coming from a place of authority that really, you know, often the critic doesn't really have the right to come from. And it particularly is why a lot of people who when they read criticism of their classic, their favourite writers, I mean, there's a very,

very sniffy book by T.S. Eliot called After Strange Gods, which he withdrew, where he's incredibly rude about D.H. Lawrence and he's incredibly rude about William Blake. William Blake is a sort of man who's kind of made his own homemade furniture. It's not really poetry. You know... See, if William Blake was on Twitter, that would give him a bad afternoon.

Because I think what I slightly wanted to read... What a Twitter account that would be. Christ, let's do a Blake Twitter account. What I wanted to read after this book is I would quite like to read this book, rewritten in the age of social media, which gives the whole... So I have a very difficult relationship with social media

and just had to stop it because it was sending me mad because I don't like reading people slagging off books. I don't like people reading people slagging off books that they have not read. Oh, this press release is annoying, so I'm going to be giving this book a miss. Oh, I don't like that cover. I read two pages of this when I was at Softplay

with my three small sons, and I'll save you all the trouble of reading it by telling you all it's crap. That thing particularly aggravated me. That is a real example. I've disguised it by giving this person an extra son. He's only got two sons. But he did actually tweet that about a book.

And loads of people replied saying, oh, thanks for saving me the bother. You're so clever. I won't now read it. That just drove me mad. So I had to remove myself from this environment. But my pet thing was, people would say, tweet a picture of the book. This book is so brilliant, I just can't put it down.

You've put it down. You've put it down to tell people, but you can't put it down. How's that working? How can that possibly be true? That is a real thing. I'm the idiot, because I'm the one looking at the Twitter feed, shouting at you. I don't ever reply, obviously,

because I don't like falling out with people, because that would make me nervous. I'm the feed shouting at you. I don't ever reply, obviously, because I don't like falling out with people, because that would make me nervous. I'm the one shouting at you, rather than going to read a lovely long book that I know I will enjoy. This is one of the things I think this book is about, even though, as you say, it's written before the age of social media, but that idea of performed reading,

performative reading, which has become a real thing on social media. And what he's trying to say in here is, you know what don't uh get uptight about things you haven't read read and keep them separate and in fact what he ends up saying in the book is the better you become at talking about books you haven't read the more likely you are to become a creative individual. Because you will be free, because you can express yourself, and you will not be weighed down by the weight of cultural responsibility. Let me refer.

On that very point, the slightly sceptical Ms Mantell says, if the path to creativity lies across the swamp of ignorance, we may founder in solipsism and end in silence, a silence bleaker than the one that prevails in the well-run public library. She's good. She's so good. Well run there is really brilliant. Okay, Ben, we're going to stop in a minute, but could you give us one more piece to go out with? Yeah, this is really what you were just saying. It's from Not Being Ashamed,

at the end of How To Talk About Books You Haven't Read. To speak without shame about books we haven't read, we would thus do well to free ourselves of the oppressive image of cultural literacy without gaps, as transmitted and imposed by family and school, for we can strive towards this image for a lifetime without ever managing to coincide with it. Truth destined for others is less important than truthfulness to ourselves, something attainable only by those who free themselves from the obligation to seem cultivated, which tyrannises us from within and prevents us from being ourselves.

That is great. I salute you, Monsieur Bayard. Okay, so we're going to wrap up in a moment, but before we wrap up, let's take the vote I talked about at the beginning. You may not abstain. You have to vote, okay? So I am going to ask for a show of hands, and I'm going to go from the left of the stage. Which member of this panel has not read How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read by Pierre Bayard? Was it? Raise your hand if you think it was John Mitchinson. I would say that's about 25%. Do you think it was Kathy Rensenbrink? I would say that was about 8%.

Do you think it was Ben Moore? I would say that that was about 10%. Do you think it was me? I'd say that was everyone else. Would you like to know who hasn't read it? So I read it about two weeks ago. Ben read it when he said he did. Yeah, it's a signed copy and everything.

Cathy has read it. That means John Mitchinson. Way! Thank you. That means John Mitchinson. Way! I allowed myself to read the list of abbreviations at the front. I did read reviews, obviously.

I talked to people about it. The really nice end to this, the happy ending, as it were, in a non-orgasmic yoga sense... LAUGHTER ..is that I really, really want to read the book now and can't wait to get back to my tent and read it. Brilliant. OK, so, listen, thanks, everybody. Thanks ever so much. As appropriate for a festival,

that is a gluten-free, vegan-friendly wrap. This... ..with all the clips and notes and links for further reading. Thank you all for coming. You've been a wonderful audience. I want to thank Ben. I want to thank Kathy, Nikki, our producer, our patrons and sponsors Unbound. Thanks very much, everyone.

Thank you. If you prefer to listen to Backlisted without adverts, you can sign up to our Patreon. It's www.patreon.com forward slash backlisted. As well as getting the show early, you get a whole two extra episodes of what we call Locklisted, which is Andy, me and Nicky talking about the books, music and films we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight.