How To Talk About Books You Haven't Read

Easy, really:

Fortunately, the book’s absence from my life hasn’t prevented me, as a citizen of the United States of Amazonikipedia, from learning everything there is to know about it. I know, for instance, that Bayard, a respected literature professor, admits in the preface that he doesn’t enjoy reading, has little time for it, and lectures frequently on books he hasn’t readscandalous revelations that helped make the book a sensation in Europe. I know, from a photo of the book, that it is small and blue. I know, from Bayard’s author photo, that he is fiftyish and improbably slim, and likes to dress entirely in black. In fact, in lieu of reading the actual book, I’ve spent a very long time scrutinizing this picture, which strikes me as a masterpiece of calculated faux-casual self-revelation: Bayard leans against a railing in front of a scenic spray of graffitia touch of v ité to anchor all the abstractionand his eyes simmer like coq au vin, and his forehead bunches with a devastating whisper of wrinkle-cleavage (my God, he is about to _think_!), and he appears to be sucking on something, perhaps the word oeuvre. In short, he looks like a foot soldier in the vast army of impish popular intellectuals France has been training since the days of Roland Barthes, just in case the struggle for freedom should ever come down to the ability to wring paradoxes out of a stone or unriddle the world with Lacanian decoder rings.

Almost ready to be a blogger.