Sometimes, you just have to fake it.
Whether you need to wing that last-minute term paper or just charm a stranger at the office holiday party, Lit Hub humbly offers “An Incomplete Guide to Proper Literary Name-Dropping.” If this nifty article doesn’t do the trick, you can always turn to Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk about Books You Haven’t Read, which extols the virtues of skimming and/or gleaning information from what others say about a text, among other approaches.
Recently, the editors of the New York Times offered up their picks for the ten best books of 2016—perhaps, in a pinch, these shall be your favorites too? Of course, there’s always the chance you won’t have to talk about the books themselves, but can get by on a critique of their covers.
Meanwhile, over at Book Riot, Michelle Anne Schlinger presents her ode to “dirty books” and the good old fashioned reading that makes them so—books that have been read to death, books with broken spines and torn pages, books that take on that beloved “old book smell." Schlinger notes, “To be in such disrepair, for a book, means that you have been enjoyed.”
As the holidays approach, and with them a handful of precious lazy afternoons, I ask myself, Remember reading for pleasure?