Organic Frog

How many times have you been seated in a boring meeting room when suddenly someone is mentioning The Tipping Point, The Long Tail, Convergence Culture, The Cluetrain Manifesto, The Paradox of Choice or The Wisdom of Crowds and then making an obscure point? At this precise moment, you ask yourself: Has this person even been reading the back cover of the book he is talking about? And sometimes you contribute to the debate without having been reading the book in question!

Well there is nothing to be ashamed of if you’ve read Pierre Bayard’s book How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read. In a very well written style (I’ve read the book in French!) Pierre Bayard, a French professor of literature and a practicing psychoanalyst, is giving a lot of very interesting insights on one of the most taboo subject amongst scholar (and planners!) “non-reading”.

“The first of these constraints could be called the obligation to read. We live in a society . . . in which reading still remains the object of a form of sacralization”

The two first chapters of the book are dealing with the ways of non-reading and the situations where you can find yourself discussing a book you haven’t read. These chapters are highly interesting if you want to find out how writers are commenting on other writers work without having read the books for instance! You can have a read through two Times online articles for good reviews.

The final chapter of the book is the most interesting, the author develops his main thesis: How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read! His main advices about non-reading are: don’t be ashamed, impose your ideas, make up your own stories and talk about yourself!

And as Adrian Tahourdin says:

“It would, of course, be wrong to take everything Bayard writes here seriously – and maybe he would not want us to – but we could do worse than heed his therapeutic advice when he suggests that

“in order to . . . talk without shame about books we haven’t read, we should rid ourselves of the oppressive image of a flawless cultural grounding, transmitted and imposed [on us] by the family and by educational institutions, an image which we try all our lives in vain to match up to. For truth in the eyes of others matters less than being true to ourselves, and this truth is only accessible to those who liberate themselves from the constraining need to appear cultured, which both tyrannizes us and prevents us from being ourselves.”

Bayard cheerfully insists that he will continue to talk about books he hasn’t read – he seems to have got away with it until now – and offers the optimistic notion that only when people overcome their “fear of culture” can they themselves begin to write.”

This book should be a must read for every planner because it isn’t praising cultural devaluation but urges us to be more creative.

By the way I haven’t read three of the books I mentioned on the first paragraph although I am mentioning them on a regular basis! Welcome to the non-reading age!

[Pic via]