The Paris Project

If I were queen,

I'd ban the following phrase from scholarly conversation: "Have you read..." This applies only to scholarly conversations - when talking with fellow booklovers, I love being the naive respondent to a question regarding an excellent book. Admission of ignorance is a small price to pay for a good lead. This is an excerpt from a conversation I had with a scholar recently.

Him: Have you read So-and-so's book about meaning and the universe?
Me: No.
Him: Seriously, you haven't read it?
Me: No.
Him: Wow. Well, it says... You really need to read it.

This post is not simply a way of digging myself out of the embarrassment hole: that book was far afield from my discipline and my areas of interest, so I don't mind not having read it. And if I were truly embarrassed, I wouldn't blog about it. I'd hold it inside where the memory of it would raise my blood pressure and give me insomnia. What's really a problem is the redundancy of the question, "Have you read..."

Let's try running that conversation hypothetically:
Him: I recently read So-and-so's book about meaning and the universe (pause and make eye contact), and I loved the way she wrote about...
(The eye contact presents me with a choice: say I've read it and talk about the book, or engage the ideas without mentioning the book. The second choice implies I either haven't read or heard of the book, which my conversation partner will understand).
Me: Actually, I just realized I need to meet someone at this very time, so please allow me to excuse myself.

I went with the third option (hypothetically), but I shouldn't have. Professional courtesy would have me engage the idea without mentioning the book, and courtesy on the better-read speaker's part would have him pursue the ideas as well, inserting information from the book in helpful ways. My lack of reference to the book is a clear sign I haven't read it, and he knows it, and I know he knows, and so we may proceed.

Asking bluntly, "Have you read...?" might work out well, if the person has read the book. But if they haven't, you're at a stalemate as to whether or not the conversation should even continue. You've also introduced a molehill of a hierarchy, setting one person over another, though both people have surely read thousands of significant books. Now the question that followed my admission of ignorance, "Seriously, you haven't read it?" is totally unnecessary. The chances of me changing my mind, realizing I have actually read it, are very slim. The "wow" is similarly unnecessary, and disinspired me from wanting to read it, because if I got the book and read it, I'd have to replay that "wow" in my mind whenever I picked it up.

Not that anyone asked, but this is how I feel about academic discussions, especially those occuring between people in different disciplines. The chances of me having read anything in early 20th century architectural theory, or music industry trends, are very slim. I am interested, however, and an indirect introduction to the literature will hook me every time. So don't act amazed because I haven't read the most important book from your discipline at the time you went through grad school, and I won't ask you whether you've compared the account of Margaret Mead's marriage to Gregory Bateson in Mead's autobiography, Blackberry Winter, with her daughter's biography, With a Daughter's Eye. Seriously, you haven't? Wow.