How to talk about books you've NEVER read

A few months ago, Homer's Odyssey began trending on Twitter/X after it was announced that a live-action adaptation was in development.

People were sharing quotes, debating Odysseus' character, analyzing the hero's journey. The usual intellectual flexing.

But then the replies started flooding in: "I've never actually read this." "Should I be embarrassed I don't know this?" "Is it too late to start?"

I watched this unfold with genuine confusion… not at the people admitting they hadn't read it, but at how surprised everyone seemed that many hadn't read a 2,800-year-old epic poem.

I'd never read it either. Hell, I'd barely heard people talk about it. Yet there I was, wanting to join the conversation, wrestling with a question that probably haunts more of us than we'd care to admit:

How do you talk about a book you've never read without being dishonest, and why do we feel like criminals for not having consumed every piece of literature that matters to someone somewhere?

The Guilt We Carry

We live in this weird cultural moment where not having read certain books feels like a moral failing.

You know the look… that slight widening of the eyes when you admit you've never touched 1984 or Man’s Search for Meaning. The subtle shift in conversation. The quiet judgment that says, "How can you call yourself educated?"

It's exhausting. And it's also completely ridiculous.

During my Odyssey moment, I realized that most of our literary shame is built on a lie. We've created this binary world where you've either "read" a book or you haven't, as if reading were some kind of virginity you lose once and never get back.

Digging into this question led me to Pierre Bayard's brilliant book: How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read. The title alone should win awards for honesty.

Bayard, a French literature professor(yes, someone whose job literally depends on having read books), makes an argument so simple it's subversive:

The guilt we feel about not reading certain books is not just unnecessary, it's intellectually limiting.

He argues that "reading" isn't binary. It's not read/unread. It exists on a spectrum of relationships we have with texts, and most of those relationships are far more complex and valuable than we give them credit for.

And he's not just being philosophical. He's describing how human cognition works.

We exist in constant relationship with information, ideas, and cultural references, most of which we encounter indirectly, partially, or through other people's interpretations.

Every book exists within a vast network of other books, ideas, and cultural references. When people discuss The Great Gatsby, they're not just talking about what happens to Jay Gatsby.

They're engaging with concepts about the American Dream that connect to dozens of other works, historical moments, and personal experiences.

This interconnectedness means you can often contribute meaningfully to discussions about books by understanding their place in this larger web of ideas, even without having read the specific text.

Understanding Your Relationship With ‘Unread’ Books

Bayard breaks down our relationships with unread books into four categories that are far more useful than the brutal read/unread binary:

1. Unknown Books

You know absolutely nothing about them. They exist in the vast library of human knowledge you haven't encountered yet. This is simply the reality of having finite time in an infinite universe of texts. No shame here, just acknowledgement of human limits.

2. Heard-of Books

You know their reputation, their cultural weight, maybe some famous quotes or references. You understand their place in the conversation without having experienced them directly. This is actually a sophisticated form of cultural literacy.

You're participating in what scholars call "intertextual knowledge", where understanding comes from a book's relationship to other ideas rather than its content alone.

3. Skimmed Books

You've encountered excerpts, reviews, summaries, and adaptations. You have a real, if incomplete, relationship with the work. This partial knowledge is often more honest than people who read something once years ago and pretend to remember it perfectly.

4. Forgotten Books

You read them once but recall little beyond vague impressions. This category might include most books you think you've "read". Memory is selective, subjective, and embarrassingly unreliable.

The forgetting curve, discovered by psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus, shows that we lose roughly 50% of new information within an hour and 90% within a month unless we actively work to retain it.

The Forgetting Curve

The Art of Honest Engagement

So how do you talk about books you’ve never read? Bayard's approach is refreshingly practical:

1. Accept That Not Reading Is Normal

Stop apologizing for being human. Most people haven't read most books. The entire literary canon of human civilization is vast. Nobody has read even a meaningful fraction of it. Your reading list doesn't define your intelligence or worth.

If you need to acknowledge your relationship to a book, be honest: "I haven't read it, but I understand its reputation is..." or "I'm familiar with it through..."

This is intellectual honesty.

2. Know Your Level of Familiarity

Use Bayard's categories as a starting point. Are you completely unknown to this book? Do you know it by reputation? Have you encountered excerpts? This self-awareness helps you speak authentically about what you actually know.

Pretending to know more than you do always backfires. Intellectual honesty, on the other hand, is magnetic. People are more drawn to authentic engagement than to performative knowledge.

3. Speak from Context, Not Content

Here's where understanding intertextuality becomes your superpower. Instead of trying to fake your way through plot details or specific scenes, focus on what you can speak to authentically. Books don't exist in isolation. They're part of ongoing conversations that span centuries.

You can discuss:

• The book's place in literary history

• Its influence on other works you have encountered

• The conversations and debates it has generated

• Its relationship to broader themes or movements

• What critics and other readers have said about it

For example, you can engage meaningfully with 1984's relevance to modern surveillance culture without remembering Room 101's specific details. You can discuss The Great Gatsby's exploration of wealth and status without recalling how many parties Gatsby threw.

The broader themes often matter more than the plot mechanics.

4. Lean Into Themes and Ideas

Books are vehicles for ideas, emotions, and ways of seeing the world. Often, these bigger concepts are more interesting and important than the specific details anyway.

This is where your own knowledge and experience become valuable, even without having read the source material.

When Odyssey was trending, the real conversation wasn't about whether Odysseus took Route A or Route B to get home. It was about heroism, homecoming, the nature of storytelling itself, the relationship between adventure and responsibility.

You can engage meaningfully with these themes through cultural osmosis, other works, or simply thoughtful reflection, whether you’ve read Homer or not.

5. Use Your Own Perspective

This is the most important point: your perspective has value, even, especially, when it comes from outside the text. Your knowledge, experience, and way of seeing the world can illuminate aspects of a book that even people who've read it might miss.

Maybe you're a psychologist engaging with Crime and Punishment's exploration of guilt without having read Dostoevsky's specific treatment. Maybe you're an entrepreneur connecting with Atlas Shrugged's themes of individual achievement without slogging through Ayn Rand's prose.

Your angle adds something unique to the conversation that pure textual knowledge can't provide.

Why This Matters Beyond Literature

Bayard's approach touches on fundamental questions about how we relate to knowledge, culture, and each other.

We've created a culture that values consumption over contemplation, completion over connection. We treat books like items to be checked off a list rather than ideas to be wrestled with. We prioritize having read something over thinking deeply about it.

But I've learned that the most interesting conversations about books often happen between people who bring different relationships to the text.

Someone who's read it three times, someone who's never read it but knows its reputation, someone who's read everything else the author wrote. Each perspective adds something unique.

This is how culture actually propagates—through layers of interpretation, reference, and connection rather than direct transmission.

The person who read the book isn't necessarily better positioned to discuss its implications than someone who understands its core insights through application and reflection.

The goal isn't to prove you've read everything. The goal is to think better, to understand more, to connect ideas in ways that wouldn't occur to anyone else.

In a nutshell

I’ve not yet read The Odyssey, even after that Twitter/X discussion. But I’ve thought deeply about what it represents, how it connects to other stories I know, and why it continues to resonate after nearly three millennia.

I engaged with the ideas rather than feeling shame about missing the text.

Yes, reading the book has its own benefits, but there’s literally no way you can read every book on earth.

So the next time you encounter a conversation about a book you haven't read, don't retreat in shame. Don't pretend knowledge you don't have. Instead, bring your authentic perspective to the themes and ideas at play.

Ask questions. Share connections. Admit what you don't know while contributing what you do. Be intellectually honest about your relationship to the text while being intellectually generous with your engagement.

The literary world doesn't need more people who've read everything. It needs more people who think deeply about the ideas those books contain.

A curious mind engaging honestly with ideas it hasn't fully encountered is infinitely more valuable than a closed mind that's consumed everything but learned nothing.

The conversation is waiting for you. All you need to bring is genuine curiosity and the courage to be honest about what you know and don't know. That's more than most people manage, and it's exactly what every good conversation needs.

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I’m Bechem Ayuk, a professional ghostwriter. I ghostwrite weekly newsletters for C-suite executives.

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