Book what?

What’s with this book? Between reading and not reading, there’s a gulf of in-betweens that characterises one’s relationship with books.

Anyone can relate to that.

I was revisiting this funny book by a French dude, Pierre Bayard, also available in English[1], a book not just on the right to talk about books one hasn’t read, but also how’s that a good thing, to the point of even becoming a hallmark of creativity.

I won’t go into that – how balmy it can feel to be at ease to talk about books you don't have a clue. Read Pierre’s book to find out. This nice piece by Maria Popova will probably open your appetite, or be satiating enough, who knows?

Actually, Pierre goes against the reductive stance of either having read the putative book or not, as you definitely should have – God forbid if you haven’t – if you wish to venture to say anything about it.

He even points out that such a binary state of affairs is a rather limited one, leading to a more than fair amount of deception, on par only with matters of money or sex.

Once restricted to a plain cow or bull, a purple cow[2] will forever be missed, as much as a pink bull[3], hence the toll on creativity; just think about how many bovine colours would be missed here.

He came up with a nominal scale of four categories to cover for the spectrum of one’s relation to this or that book, with its respective abbreviations and all: UB designating books unknown; SB, books skimmed; HB, books heard of; and FB, books forgotten.

Well, that’s hardly enough for me, so I thought about extending it for a more nuanced appreciation of a pretentiously far richer proclivity to be had in such encounters of the reader with its book, in the realm of pudic evanescence.

Here goes, alphabetically:

AB – Awful book; the awareness of its existence mandates a safe distance to be kept from it at all times, however prejudiced that may be.

BB – Betrothed book; book you intend to read but you seem never to come around and consummate the damn reading.

CB – Choked book; a book waded through, partially read and postponed, resuming of which now keeps being indefinitely protracted.

DB – Duplicated book; unopened book bought a second time.

EB – Eavesdropped book; one-eye skimmed book and left alone since.

FB – Forgotten book; from Pierre’s, you may even have read it but it doesn’t make a difference, you haven’t a clue now.

GB – Gestalt book; a book you believe you grok its content by just looking at the cover.

HB – Heard of book; from Pierre’s, you may even have read a review or two of it and have a fair picture of what’s about. You’ll probably never read it.

IB – Impassable book; a book which to you is like The Voynich manuscript.

JB – JOMO book; a book from which you derive the joy of missing out on - after Word Spy.

KB – Knock-off book; a fake, typically a new book from an author whose previous one was great, leading you to buy this one and be duped.

LB – Leafed through book; like picking petals from a daisy in the fashion of “she loves me, she loves me lot”.

MB – Morphean book; a book that puts you to sleep every time you attempt to read it.

NB – Nugatory book; a book not worth the time or effort.

OB – Opened book; book opened and closed with no recollection of the event other than the opening itself.

PB – Piled book; book bought and piled on, just that.

QB – Queried book; a book you asked people who supposedly read it about and got it, the feeling.

RB – Regurgitated book; book read, not necessarily in its entirety, and harassingly recommended to everyone else.

SB – Skimmed book; from Pierre’s, supposedly with both eyes.

TB – Travelled book; you took it with you outside several times and either never opened it or whatever, with the same effect; nil.

UB – Unknown book; from Pierre’s, the pinnacle of creativity.

VB – Vibe book; a book that gave you the vibes, for no ascertainable reason, to the point of losing track of knowing if you have read it or not.

WB – Waded book; book scanned, flicked through, somewhat read.

XB – Xanadu book; a luxurious book, of a kind of beauty sought as hardly attainable, like Ernst Haeckel’s “Art Forms in Nature”, or the books by Edward Tufte.

YB – Yen book; a book you have a yen for - not vibe, which comes outside-in - an inside-out yearning, a visceral longing you want to hold on to by avoiding picking it up, the book.

ZB – Zest book; a book you’ve read with great gusto, priming you to acquire a knock-off by the same author - like Mr Harari’s “Sapiens”, soon followed by “Homo Deus” – leaving you afraid of picking it up again, as it probably wasn’t so good.

As in the case of Pierre’s list of four categories, these are non-exclusive. For example, you can have a fleeting vibe (VB) from an unknown (UB) book that you’ve ended up acquiring and throwing onto a pile (PB).

There you have it! How’s that for silly?

[1] Bayard, P. (2007) How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read. New York. Bloomsbury.

[2] The Purple Cow started as a nonsense poem by the lively Frank Gelett Burgess and turned into a book title a century later by the marketing guru Seth Godin, who thought of one such cow as the quintessential relief from the boring sight of hundreds of regular ones over dozens of kilometres while travelling in France, thereby positing it as something really remarkable, the basis of a whole book thesis: you’d give your phantom limb for the privilege to milk one - as much as I recall from reading such memorable opus.?

[3] I made that one up. It’s unremarkable, can’t be milked, and probably tastes like chicken.