I've recently discovered there's a "secret" book being passed along by several grad students and professors here at UF. It's Pierre Bayard's How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read. Bayard is a French lit professor and psychoanalyst; so despite the potentially anti-intellectual sound of the title, he actually puts forth an intriguing, and I believe, therapeutic theory of reading using figures from lit/lit-crit as examples for his ideas.

I heard about the book from a UF professor, yet I never hear anyone talking about it. That is--until I confess: "Have you ever heard of Pierre Bayard's ..." Not only has the other person heard of it, s/he has read it, and passed it along to others.

So a clandestine underground exists for merely discussing a book whose subject is non-reading.

Surely you know that old New Yorker cartoon: Two professors sitting on a airplane. One says, "have you read the new book by Derrida?" And the other responds, "Read it? I haven't even taught it yet!"

I'm making my third attempt at War and Peace this summer. (Which reminds me of the Woody Allen line ... "I took an Evelyn Woods Speed Reading Class. I read War and Peace in 15 minutes. ... It's about Russia." And then there is this from M*A*S*H: Radar: War AND Peace? Hawkeye: Yeah, Tolstoi could go either way!")

my list in a perpetual and eternal state of growth (as it should be), but right now it's Jean-Paul Sartre's Between Existentialism and Marxism. However I did buy a copy of it today, so that's a step in the right direction.

Thanks, Jim. I was trying to think of Lodge's book while writing this post...which, fittingly, I haven't read but have only heard about.

Sounds like you're reducing the size of your antilibrary, Jim. Perhaps you've heard of it. As I understand it, the antilibrary was what Umberto Eco's called the collection of books he hadn't read (Nassim Taleb invokes the antilibrary to frame The Black Swan, the book I'm catching up with this week). Anyway, a large antilibrary, or a large collection of unread books, the idea goes, keeps us cognizant of the boundedness of our knowledge. Taleb might say that as we read we nourish an increasing risk that comes along with presuming we know more (or worse yet, know enough).

Anyway, the antilibrary. Probably my summer achievement will turn out to be that my own antilibrary remains every bit as sizable and unread as before.

Enjoy Manovich.