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

Episode Date: June 23, 2026

Recorded back in 2018 at Port Elliot festival, Andy and John are joined on stage by writer, actor and comedian Ben Moor, author of More Trees to Climb (Granta) and whose comedy show ‘Book Talk Book Talk Book’ first premiered at that years Festival, and writer and journalist Cathy Rentzenbrink, author of The Last Act of Love and the forthcoming The Agatha Christie Cure and is currently at work on her first novel. The book under discussion is Pierre Bayard’s How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, first published in France as Comment parler des livres que l'on n'a pas lus? by Editions du Minuit in 2007, and in the UK by Granta in a translation by Jeffrey Mehlman. * 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 and join in with the book chat, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes and exclusive writing, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted *You can sign up to our free monthly newsletter here  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi, it's Andy. Hi, it's John. John, how do you feel about this whole hi, it's Andy? Hi, it's John thing. Well, I don't know. You've got to start somewhere, I suppose, Andy. It's, I know who I am. I know who you are, but maybe not everybody who's tuning in will do that. Can we ever truly know one another, John? I think that is absolutely the key question. And one I'd love to talk more about, but unfortunately, that's not what we're here to do. We're here to plow back into the archives of Batlisted for another repeat. We are eight years ago in the sunshine, a slightly kind of moist sunshine of July 2018 in Port Elliott, the Port Elliott Festival, the much-missed Port Elliott Festival in Cornwall. We are talking about a book by the French writer and psychoanalyst. Pierre Bayard, and it has the great title, legendary title of how to talk about books you haven't read.

And we were joined by the writer-actor-commodian Ben Moore, who had a show on, I think, at that very same festival called Book Talk, Book, Talk, Book, and the great Cathy Renson Brink, former bookseller, author of The Last Act of Love and a manual for heartache, and also somebody who's like Andy and I have had to talk about books that we haven't actually read for a living and it's a marvellously I think funny conversation and he gives us some footnotes to the footnotes in the year of reading dangerously and I do I do my usual thing about telling horrible stories about having lied to authors about having read their books the thing is regular listeners to this show of the last 10 years will not have been put off by the tremendous

self-regard we display on this show week in week out but nevertheless my memory is this was a really happy show. Going back to this episode, incidentally, this is not an episode I re-listened to. So I'm doing the very thing I'm talking about right now. What strikes me is this is timeless. The book was published nearly 20 years ago. We recorded this episode eight years ago. And here we are right now bullshitting away, as is the tradition. Just sort of slightly joyously looking at the books, you know, the books mentioned on our website page. Herman sort of you know the thing about that listed we love books about books and this is books about books from a really interesting angle

which is that you can you be intelligent about books you haven't read and just just the sheer madness of the list here Herman Valville Moby Dick obviously you're very dangerously Nicholson Baker you and I Michelle Welbeck the map and the territory Italo Calvino if on a winter's night a traveller Rollin Bar, S. Z. John Sutherland is Heathcliff a murderer, and T.S. Eliot, after strange gods. I mean, I don't know, that feels like, that feels like a very rich, a rich granola to get stuck into.

And yet, we, with the base alchemy of gold into lead, we managed to turn that highbrow content into an hour of informal, informal chat at a book festival. Anyway, if you enjoy this show, there's lots more going on on our Patreon, which you can find at patreon.com forward slash backlisted. Lots of chat on the message boards, lots of comment about new pieces of writing, and some shows that we've recorded recently just for subscribers. Currently on the Patreon, this month's episode of Posh Bingo, where we choose a winner of the Booker Prize at random, as luck would have it, or destiny. The most recent show is about Hotel Dulac by podcast favorite Anita Bruckner. That was a lovely, funny, warm discussion. We were joined by Dr. Rudin McCormack for that. That's been archived on the Patreon, so do come and listen.

And the next episode of Backlisted Readers, where we ask a patron of the show to recommend us a book. We read it and we talk to them about it. That's coming up on June the 27th, 2026. and that is an episode on At Swim Two Birds by Flann O'Brien. And I don't wish to drop any of my colleagues in it, but it was perhaps the recording of that show that prompted the decision to rerun this one, and I'll just leave it there.

All right, everybody. Enjoy the show. Bye. Bye. Hello and welcome to Batman. The podcast. that gives new life to old books. Today, you find us returning to the Bowling Green Stage

at the Pauls Elliott 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-pound lobster roll we had in much. 10 pounds. I'm John Richardson and my name's Andy Miller. I'm the author of the Year of Reading Dangerity. I'm very pleased to be back at Port Elliot and I'm very pleased to be back on the Bowling Green Sage. 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 Pronown 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 Bayer. So it seemed very fitting that Ben would be here to do that. And welcome back, Kathy Rensonbring. 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. 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 you think 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 Haia, and you live down here now, Kathy, don't you? I do. I 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 of Port Elliot can name a character from the novel Moby Dick

and I will allow any whales that you're going to think of it. 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 tense, 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. And your job... Your job, would you 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. We interrupt this broadcast from Port Elliot in the intense and interesting discussion of Pierre Bayard to bring you this message from our sponsor. Spoke. The sharp, smart, online menswear company, spoke, design men's trousers, and now, shorts and polo shirts with a difference.

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It's no hassle, no expense. You get sharp, personalized design delivered in just two working days. And as a backlisted listener, if you go to www.spoke-london.com and place an order, you'll get £20 off your first order. Just use the code backlisted 20. Terms and conditions apply. I shall now return you to the tent. Right. At this point, we normally, 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 1 o'clock. So I thought a better question would be, what have you seen or what are you planning to see at the Port Elliott Festival, Andy?

I'm going to see our former colleague Matthew Clayton, who used to be on backlisted, 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 Roli Lee, who I publish and who failed to tell me that he was coming to the festival.

So 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 great trip, I mean. What else? Lippwicher, literary tarot consultancy. I'm just going to be prepping the next one of these for tomorrow. But as we'll discover, Andy, we don't need to prep anymore. We don't, you're right. It's just, that's the whole thing. Relax.

How do you talk about books you haven't read? Ben Moore. Yeah. You chose this book for us to talk about at Portelia. Yeah. When did you first encounter this book or read this book? Well, I know that because I, 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. 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 lecture, 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 a 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, 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, you know. 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 of 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, 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 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 managed 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 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 to listen to us talking about it for an hour. It's a win-win situation. Read it or don't read. But he's very, very charming, isn't he?

Well, we've got a clip of Bayar. We've got a couple of clips of Bayar. This is a clip of Bayar who doesn't speak very good English, everybody. What a thrilling moment to play a non-English speaker for faltering through. Assumably 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 to kill your wife and so on. But no one's book about this common situation of having to speak about books.

I was surprised, but in France, when the book was published, many people in book, 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 advice about books. And after having read this book, they are able to answer precisely. So he went in the book, it was published.

He was praised by booksellers. He says, thank you. Thank you. This has expanded my portfolio. fibbing that I can you, Kathy, you were a book, sir. 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 end. 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, 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 Column Torbin 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 is kind of interesting, very, 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 seemed to some – I took a totally different line, right? I lied my backside 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, is this good, Captain Corelli's... No, not Captain Gerely's... The English patient by Michael And Archie. I went, no, it's awful. Because I'd read it, and it is.

The Golden Booker had it. Another customer came up and disagreed 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 read it. wrote, I said, no, it was much better to conceal what you really thought. How much simpler? As 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 with the same half dozen novels over and over again, Captain's Corelli's Mandolin, The Secret History, perfume, bird song. 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 will 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 Carly

Yes, it was. Are you a mind reader? Footnotes. For more on this topic, Pierre Bales, How to Talk About Books You Haven't read, is warmly recommend these. 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 arts in the staff room. I bet 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, Reddy's Reg. Just reporting the facts as I saw them. I worked briefly in the books department of a department store in Canterbury in the 1980. Did you? Mainly so I could use the BBI microfiche. Yeah. I mean, nowadays you just bring everything up, but that was so exciting. Who here doesn't know what a microfeas 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 sort of, you try not to read things that are in the same disease environment. Yeah. Ecology. You don't want to be inoculation. You don't want to keep your work pure and uninfected by something. I mean, they do share similar themes. But you've done, Andy, you've done what Byr, you've absolutely kept the Byar program. You've made this book part of your autobiography.

There's a great chapter towards the end where he quotes Oscar Wild. Oscar Wilde said he never reads, 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 Bayar and you've kind of, you've kind of, you've kind of woven it into your own mythology, your own journey to truth, Andy. Tell us about the moment of truth. Well, okay. So, I haven't lied about having read a book since 2005. Although that is...

I'm Andy Miller. I'm a bookah. I'm a bookaholic. Although that isn't true. I have lied about this 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 damn brown. No, I've read that. No, I know. From cover to cover. I see as a little reader though. It's just getting nervous, a little anxiety. But I sort of, I realized that what, the stuff that I was, that you heard me read out about there, about, but I wasn't really seeking to deceive anybody.

I just loved books so much that I wanted to, I wanted to own that knowledge of books. And I wanted to own that in, every book. I wanted to know about every book. And so I took shortcuts. It's more that. And I realized that I needed to stop doing that. And in the 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. And that stops you reading. Because he's a psychoanalyst, of course, he's a professor of literature and a cycle.

by an animist by eye. He says that freedom from cultural, that cultural pressure is the same as what a psychoanalysis does frees us from our own, you know, the psychological and emotional burdens that we have and that those two burdens are kind of aligned. So it's a sort of, it's a sort of therapeutic book. But he is, there's a very interesting review of it

by Hilary Mantell who kind of, like 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 and 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 do I know you were you a writer well I don't really read my wife reads will she have heard of you that kind of that's literally that's literally the conversation she

he's got a line in here just one line about in the chapter Encounters in Society, about events like this one, about book festivals. He says, in a public 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 death. So, Ben, would you be kind enough to re-you select a little bit to read the book for us? This bit from the beginning, this section here.

Okay, 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 largest 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, but 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 was 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 do you get it another time? Or is it a gift? You know, Kathy, you were saying that you don't tell lies about books and you said you had an experience. 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. So, 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 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. snog an author at the bar and stuff. Not that I personally ever did that, you understand. But what I once witnessed was, 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 work at how they could go to the bog during the speeches. So I didn't have to give any mental time to what we were supposed to be celebrating. And we're just who's overing 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 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 they keep wondering when I'm going to say oh and I'm sorry about the bit at the end

I never came I once 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, 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 fatic community, Bayer would be, well on my side, I talked about it

and a kind of breezy, you know, yeah, great, I think we can really do good stuff with it. And they just, as American writer just looked me in the eyes, locked my, said, have you actually read it? And I just, No.

No, I haven't. I'm sorry, I've started it. He said, have you? No, I haven't you? What I'm going to. I'm going to. This evening. You said, I just want to be clear, okay? Because if you haven't, fine, but, you know, we haven't really got much to talk about. Okay, 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 not, it was ugly. But then, you know, the flip side of that is, there's. As the 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. Barely remember plots. I mean, it's like, you know, that you think you have a vague notion. I mean, remember rereading and loving great expectations.

It was like a, 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 imported characters from other Dickens novels. I'd done all, my memories of the book were completely not what the book was. Do you, have you read, there's a brilliant book by Nicholson Baker called You and I. Yes. About John Updike, where he sets out to write a book about John Updike. Is it in your notes?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry, Ben. I haven't read it. But I know about it. Through a conversation. It's okay. 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 out about next?

John Updike. God, I love John Updike. I'm going to write. 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 I'm just going to, 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 does he misquoting, he goes, this wasn't John Updite. This was Anne Tyler.

But Bayard does that in a slightly cheeky way, doesn't he actually, he deliberately invents bits from various classic books to catch the reader out? Although I think a lot of the criticism, I mean, it's really, it really fucks with your head because you don't know. Is that, there's quite a lot about Graham Green in the book, and I'm thinking, is that, 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. I mean, there was one section where 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. Yeah. without necessarily saying anything specific. Well, we have another clip coming up here. This is... So Bayar has a theory about why you can't lay a glove on him, right? Anything he says in his books, he says,

it's fine for me to say it. And he talks a bit about here, who actually writes his books? My books are not written by myself. But 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're a novelist and you create a murderer,

when you create a murderer, you're 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 parloric writer, I am not completely this paranoid narrator. And in France there was misunderstandings because some journalist 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 Bayer in the books. More than two. I think that's brilliant. That's like a stand-up comedian, you know, creating a stand-up persona, like being slightly different off stage,

but the audience knowing one aspect. And Michelle Welbeck does it as well in some of his non-fiction pieces. And in Mapping the Territory, there's a character, there's Michelle Wellbeck. Well, you're talking about comedian. 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 weasily and after the fact to me

a little bit like, oh, all these people keep telling me things now. I'm just going to say that there's not allowed to say it because I had thought this all through in advance, honest gov, and actually it's just my miniature Bayer and I can say what I like, which, I mean, I think I'm going to channel more Bayer in future interviews. It's just miniature, Cathy Rentson Brings. Nothing to do with me.

If you think you don't like that thing I did in Chapter 9, who go? Do you want to read a bit more, Cathy? I think it's fun to have more of the man. Yes, I read a little bit. Paying out the rope that we can hang in with. So I like the book, but the second half for me was where it really upped 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 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, 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. 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 a little codes for the books. There's U.B. Book unknown to me. So he's trying to... S.B. Book I've skimmed. H.B. Book I've heard about. F.B. Book I've forgotten. And then two pluses, extremely positive opinion. One cross, positive opinion. One minus negative opinion and two minuses is extremely negative opinion. And there's a brilliant bit that in her review, Hillary Mantell says, I won't try and do her voice. But she said, I was sued. to find Steppenwolf marked S.B., which is, remember what SB is. God, you see, I've forgotten already.

Book I've skimmed FB minus, which is a book I've forgotten negative opinion. It's Steppenwolf by Herman Hess. 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 in, which I'll read a little bit of, in Italo Calvino's, if on a winter night, a traveller, which, where he goes through lists of books on his shelves, it's about to bookshop past the thick barricade of books you haven't read, which are frowning at you from the tables and shells, trying to cow you. But you know you must never be your, 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 the end 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 their remainder. The books, pitto, 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 just to.

I was really good. I was wondering whether Bayard had had a, you know, whether his slightly kind of French intellectual had any kind of impact on literature. And I was thinking that definitely, but also maybe Roland Barth, his famous S-Z, where he takes a single story, Saracene 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 of the sum of the words of the some 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, other 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? Did you... 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 preyses some of them, you know, 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 at those. 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 a petit moment? So if I'm going to be serious for a 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 a little bit 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 I just, 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 or 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. Kathy, you were saying to me earlier, Pierre Bayer has, 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 Enquette to 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 Kathy, you, 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 doubts

that Agatha Christie got it wrong? Now, you both read this book as well, didn't you? You love this, didn't you? Well, I am, because I'm completely obsessed with Agatha Christie as well, and I love the murder of Roger Ackrode. 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 Act quite if you haven't already and that and just like go into your own little world with it. It's just unbelievably unspeakably good fun 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,

was Heathcliff a murderer, all that sort of stuff. I'm endlessly obsessed by those. I did actually, in my last book, introduced 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 favorite novels is called The 13th Tale by Diane Settifield, 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 my favourite. 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, and certainly not what the, 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, it's, it's, it's kind of, coming from. It particularly is why a lot of people

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. So William Blake is a sort of man who's kind of made his own homemade furniture.

It's not really poetry. You know, no. See, if William Blake was on Twitter, that would give him a bad afternoon. Yeah. Because I think, 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 sagging off books. I don't like people reading people sagging off books that they have not read. Oh, this press release is annoying, so I'm going to be giving this book amiss. Oh, I don't like that. cover. I read two pages of this when I was at soft play 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 aggravates 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 didn't actually tweet that about a book. And then loads 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 to tell people that you can't put it down. How's that working? How can that possibly be true? That is a real thing. I'm idiot because I'm the one looking at the Twitter feed, shouting at you. I don't ever reply, obviously, so they 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 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 skeptical Ms. Mantel 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 one that prevails in silence.

the well-run public library. She's good. She's so good. Well-run there is really, really. 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. Oh! That is great. I salute you, Monsieur Bellow. Mr. Beyer.

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 Baial? Was it?

Raise your hand if you think it was John Mitchinson. I would say that. That's about 25%. Do you think it was Cathy Rensonbrink? 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. It's a signed copy and everything. Kathy has read it. 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 the, the happy ending, as it were, in a non-organismic yoga sense. Is that I really, really want to read the book now. I can't wait. Great. Great. Brilliant. Okay, so listen, thanks, everybody. Thanks, every so much.

As appropriate for a festival, that is a gluten-free, vegan-friendly rap. Thank you all for coming. You've been a wonderful audience. I want to thank Ben. I want to think Kathy, Nikki, our producer. Thanks very much, everyone.