Don't Read All About It

So you haven't read all the pages of James Joyce's Ulysses ? Actually, you haven't read any of it, have you? No big deal, says Pierre Bayard, author of French bestseller How Do You Talk About Books You Haven't Read? ; neither has he. And that doesn't stop him from sharing his "very positive" opinion about it. Bayard, a psychoanalyst and University of Paris literature professor, wants to reassure students and bibliophobes that just knowing about a book as opposed to having read it is no reason for shame. "Even the most cultivated among us have enormous gaps in their knowledge," Bayard says....