About a month ago, one of the books making the rounds was Pierre Bayard’s Comment parler des livres que l’on n’a pas lus?, which reportedly tells readers how discuss books they’ve never read. (In an effort to play along, I wrote a post on James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake—a book I’ve never read.) The London Review of Books now has a short, interesting review of the book in question.

Bayard is not exactly against reading, even though he tells us that he has more or less given it up for himself—a risky admission for a literary academic to make. But since this is no less than the ninth title he’s contributed to the series of which it’s a part—a series appearing under the rubric of Paradoxe, it’s no surprise to learn—reading has perhaps given way to paradox-mongering for a hobby. His point is simply that we care overmuch about dividing the too-many books we live among into the two bald classes of the read and the unread, as if they were the only two classes there are. He can do better. He divides the books he, at any rate, used to live among into four, more nuanced and more realistic categories. There are the books he doesn’t know at all; the books he’s speed-read; the books he’s heard tell of one way or another; and finally the books he’s read but forgotten, as one more victim of what he nicely calls “an irrepressible movement of oblivion.”