Liberate yourself from the “great” books you’ll never read

There is a temptation to dismiss books with titles like How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read as a joke or a marketing ploy, a clever publisher’s gimmick designed to position a product in the marketplace. You see a book with a title like that and assume someone is having a laugh or has produced one of those bluffer’s guides, a kind of Cliffs Notes-style fake book for the would-be pretentious. What you might not expect is a serious—if witty—examination of the act of reading itself, the habits of readers and the reflexive guilt of nonreaders. It is a postmodern attack on the oppressive canon of “great” work, designed to liberate those of us who feel intimidated by the great gray wall of books we’ll never know. Read this piece about how to engage creatively with what you do read in The Arkansas Democrat Gazette.