It is full of interesting ideas.
Bayard convincingly makes the point
that “reading” has not a single, universally applicable meaning,
and challenges us to admit that sometimes (or often, or always) we
talk about books that we haven’t read from cover to cover.
Furthermore, he points out that,
inevitably, we only retain a fraction of the information contained in
a book. Therefore, even if we have indeed carefully read a book in
its entirety, we can only talk about our impressions and
interpretations that its content has elicited in us.
And as our memories fade with time, can
we knowledgeably talk about books that we read months and years ago?
This last point stroke a chord with me.
In a couple of occasions, I even bought a book I had already read,
thinking that I hadn’t. It was somewhat bewildering to discover
another copy of the same book in my bookcase. If I can completely
forget some of the books I read, I have certainly forgotten the
content of many of the books I still remember to have read.
What is the length of the
reading-forgetting cycle? For me, scaringly short. I used to have a
very good memory. I could read a poem a few times and be able to
recite it. But, with the passing of years, my short- and medium-term
memories have been deteriorating. Sometimes, immediately after
reading a novel, I wonder how it begun. And my memory for names,
whether they are characters in a story of real people in real life,
is simply appalling.
Hopefully, something of what I read is
still spread across a number of neurons and influences my thought.
On the basis of these considerations,
why should I be more entitled to talk about a book I read long ago
than somebody who skimmed it a couple of days ago or recently read an
article about it?
It really seems that “reading” is
in the eye of the beholder, to paraphrase a well known cliché.
Bayard suggests that we qualify each
book with an acronym that indicates its “reading status”:
UB book unknown to me SB book I have skimmed HB book I have heard about FB book I have forgotten
It seems reasonable, but I contend that
UB is totally useless because, as soon as somebody mentions to me a
book I didn’t know it existed, that book immediately acquires for
me the status HB. Then, what’s the purpose of defining the status
UB? Perhaps Bayard reserves UB for books of which he only knows the
title, or part of it, but that doesn’t make sense because the title
already tells something about the content. UB could only be used for
all books of which I don’t even know the titles, but I certainly
don’t care about them.
I also have a small issue with FB,
because you can only forget what you once knew. So, does FB apply to
books that were once SB or HB? And what about the books we actually
read (in the strictest sense of reading all words in them)?
Notice that Bayard doesn’t define any
acronym for books actually read. This is because he considers “read”
too ambiguous to be used (or perhaps because he never really reads
any book). But I like to think that if I have actually read more
than 50% of the pages of a book, and have not forgotten of its
existence, I should be able to use RB. Obviously, with time, many
RBs will silently morph into FBs.
I religiously (interesting spontaneous
choice of adverb...) maintain a list of all books I own and/or have
read. There are books I own and have read, books I own and haven’t
read [yet], books I read but don’t own (either because I borrowed
them or because I gave them away), and books I don’t own and have
never read. The last category only includes a handful of books I
want to remember for whatever reasons. Consistently with what I said
in the previous paragraph, I flag a book as “read” if I actually
read more than 50% of its pages.
All in all, the classification I find
most appropriate (if there has to be one) is as follows:
HB book I have heard of read about but never held in my hands SB book I have held in my hands and skimmed RB book of which I once read more than 50% of the pages
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