How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read

How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read by Pierre Bayard
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

 Bayard writes to everyone who has felt that flicker of panic at entering a bookstore and despair at leaving a library: there are so many books, and who has time to read them all? His solution is elegant: don't even try. He challenges conventional wisdom about the necessity to read the great canon of literature, given the vast numbers of books in the world. In fact, Bayard argues that we simply traverse books, recreating every text in the moments we remember or discuss them. Therefore it is far more important to understand where books fit into the larger scheme of art and literature.

Bayard is a practicing psychoanalyst known for iconoclastic readings of venerated texts (so French!), and his writing can be theoretical at times, leaning heavily toward reader response theory. Still, this book is small and light enough to be enjoyed by those who know nothing about literary criticism. His examples are culled from great literature, and may give you just what you need to talk about Proust and Graham Greene without blushing!

I know I've talked about this book a thousand times, but I'll mention it once more because it fits so well with Bayard's central point: So Many Books by Gabriel Zaid actually changed the way I read.

Quotable:
"Reading is first and foremost nonreading. Even in the case of the most passionate lifelong readers, the act of picking up and opening a book masks the countergesture that occurs at the same time: the involuntary act of not picking up and not opening all the other books in the universe." - Bayard

"Reading is not just acquainting ourselves with a text or acquiring knowledge; it is also, from its first moments, an inevitable process of forgetting." - Bayard

Ignorance

Ignorance: How it drives science by Stuart Firestein
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a short essay with case studies by scientist Stuart Firestein about the power of ignorance in advancing scientific knowledge and inquiry. Firestein suggests that the right kind of ignorance is actually more important to scientists than factual knowledge. The facts may mislead us, or be themselves wrong: therefore being able to ask the right questions is essential.

Firestein discusses what he calls strategies of ignorance, which scientists use to help them decide where to start looking for new knowledge. He ends the book with four brief and fascinating case studies in very different fields that all indicate the new frontiers of ignorance that scientists are broaching. It's all written to illuminate the process of scientific inquiry to laypeople. For a taste of the book, check out his 2013 TED Talk "Celebrating Ignorance".

The first connection I made while reading was to a book I often think of: So Many Books by Gabriel Said. It's another small punch in the gut, giving me a powerful sense of the scale of my own ignorance of an area I know a lot about: literature and book publishing.

Reading Ignorance and So Many Books as a librarian whose job it is to "find the answers", was a helpful reminder about the vagaries of human knowledge. Highly trained scientists spend their entire careers working on problems that may or may not have solutions - but no one will know until someone is curious enough to look. In reference librarianship, the first thing you are taught is how to conduct a reference interview to get at the patron's real question, which is almost never the first thing they ask. (Finding the real question, in fact, often takes longer than finding the answer.)

Firestein points to a microhistory by Mary Poovey called A History of the Modern Fact, which is another good follow-up for those interested in how we came to our modern definition of knowledge.

Quotable:

"Knowledge is a big subject. Ignorance is bigger. And it is more interesting." - 10

"Curiously, as our collective knowledge grows, our ignorance does not seem to shrink. Rather, we know an ever smaller amount of the total, and our individual ignorance, as a ratio of the knowledge base, grows." - 13

"Libraries are both awe inspiring and depressing. The cultural effort they represent, to record over generations what we know and think about the world and ourselves, is unquestionably majestic, but the impossibility of reading even a small fraction of the books inside them can be personally dispiriting." - 14

"The universe is not deterministic; it is probabilistic, and the future can't be predicted with certainty." - 36

"This is an example of why the brain is so poor an instrument for understanding how it works - at least through introspection. You can think about it all you want, and you will never get access to what your brain is doing computationally at any given moment. You only have access to a result, a behavior or perception, that could have been reached in numerous indistinguishable ways." - 147

"We often use the word ignorance to denote a primitive or foolish set of beliefs. In fact, I would say that 'explanation' is often primitive or foolish, and the recognition of ignorance is the beginning of scientific discourse. When we admit that something is unknown and inexplicable, then we admit that it is worthy of investigation." - 167

Edward Gorey...

...sums up my reading life right now:

"If I do not seem to be mentioning anything I’ve read lately, it is because I am in one of those periods of undifferentiated flux or something in which I am reading about fifty, at a minimum, books at once, so of course I seldom finish one. Eventually this phase will pass, and I’ll discover I have about ten pages to go in all of them, and will sit down and systematically finish them, one after another." - Edward Gorey, Floating Worlds: The Letters of Edward Gorey and Peter F. Neumeyer (quotation found at So Many Books)

Which is my roundabout way of explaining why there's no review today. I'm in the middle of a long biography of Charles Dickens and a handful of other books have been calling my attention away in brief bursts.

More intriguing books also keep creeping up on me, which of course must be acquired to read right away, or maybe later, when I have time. The only thing keeping the books stacked on my bedroom floor moving right now are library due dates! (What do you mean someone else wants this book?!)

So Many Books, so little time...

The Lost Art of Reading

The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time by David L. Ulin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a book-length meditation on reading which started out life as this editorial in the L.A. Times. As essays do, it wanders through the author's own experiences and political ideas. Fortunately, he's not a Luddite and accepts e-reading as reading, and even considers that reading on the Internet may also be real reading: his point is that we have lost the ability of paying sustained attention to anything, particularly books.

Interesting premise, but I'm not sure this expansion is an improvement of the original essay. It doesn't cover new ground, and it doesn't retread the old territory better than other books of this type. An exceptional reading memoir is Francis Spufford's lovely The Child That Books Built: A Life in Reading.

Ulin makes good points about the drawbacks of ebook technology, points I've heard before: limited selection (you can find Faulkner now!), readers' inability to share ebooks, censorship and the threat a monopoly poses to our shared cultural heritage. Ebooks can close up our reading choices, unlike the openness of books on shelves that your friends can see and comment upon. (I've had some great conversations at my bookshelves, but rarely around my Nook and never around my iPad.) Also, reading books on a device like an iPad invites distraction - and I suppose I proved Ulin's point by being distracted as I read by looking up the books and articles he mentions while at the same time taking notes for this review.

Further reading:

Ulin mentions the book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas G. Carr (another book that began life as an essay, this one for the Atlantic Monthly).

Everyone interested in information and libraries should read Jorge Luis Borges' short story "The Library of Babel"! Borges' story may be magical realism, but the slim So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance by Gabriel Zaid (translated by Natasha Wimmer) reveals our book-glutted reality and may make you rethink your relationship to your "To Read" list.

Quotations:

• "How do we pause when we must know everything in an instant? How do we ruminate when we are constantly expected to respond? How do we immerse in something (an idea, an emotion, a decision) when we are no longer willing to give ourselves the space to reflect?" - 78
• "In December 2009, a study by the Global Information Industry Center at the University of California, San Diego, found that, 'in 2008, Americans consumed information for about 1.3 trillions hours, an average of almost 12 hours per day. Consumption totaled 3.6 zettabytes and 10,845 trillion words, corresponding to 100,500 words and 34 gigabytes for an average person on an average day.' One hundred thousand words is the equivalent of a three-hundred-page novel, and it's encouraging to learn that we all read that much." - 81
• "For the culture, though, books serve as a collective soul, a memory bank, bigger than mere commerce, not only to be bought and sold. When we can't share them, directly, one-to-one, our common informational heritage is compromised." - 123