JULY 30 2014 4:01 PM
By Troy Patterson
Please send your questions for publication to [email protected]. (Questions may be edited.)
What is the easiest way for me to become, or at least to appear to be, well-read?
Troy Patterson.
Photo by Christina Paige
Thanks for your question.
The easiest way to appear to be well-read is to socialize exclusively with uncultured cretins, which simply won’t do, so instead you should subscribe to the New York Review of Books and read it religiously, committing to memory one idea from each piece and praying to achieve a casual air when, at a dinner party, fobbing off this insight as your own. I also recommend convening a book club to discuss Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, on the basis of not having opened it.
The easiest way to become well read is to earn a bachelor’s degree in English literature, blowing off no more than 20 percent of your assigned reading to promiscuously ingest detective novels, Dadaist poetry, and whatever else will encourage a bookworm infection. Then spend five or 10 years covering the publishing industry, critically and otherwise, keeping abreast of the year-end best lists and flavors of the month. You will be drowning in books, which will only stimulate your bibliomania further, and it will become impossible to pass through any swap meet or remainder sale without seizing on a volume that shows some hint of promise. You will linger at every giveaway pile of paperbacks you encounter on the street, and you will develop the auxiliary habit of assembling psychological profiles of the people who have abandoned these books, wondering what it means to find Machiavelli’s Discourses in intimate proximity to Hold ’em Poker for Advanced Players. You will come to understand the expansions and contractions of your book collection as matters of ingestion and elimination: The proper home library is a kind of living animal—both a domestic pet in need of tending and an edible beast kept to feed the head.