How to Really Talk About Books You Haven't Read

The premise of this book is a man who is fed up of being cornered at dinner parties by book nerds and philosophy students. Thus, sets about writing a book which aims to teach its readers how to outsmart these types.

Its all a bit tongue-in-cheek and remarkably amusing, when you consider that it is written about a rather stuffy subject; namely high literature. Authors such as Shakespeare, Chaucer, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. There are even chapters about getting to grips with reading the Bible and the Qur'an.
Even though the author only briefly scratches the surface of reading the classics, he does so in a very intelligent and reasonable way.

My favourite chapter was 'Can Proust change your life?'.
The author does give Proust a bit of a show more 'ribbing' over such things as his overly long sentence structures. Quoting one example of a 177 words. But it is all done with respect.

The cover design of my copy of this book, the softback release re-titled 'Who's Afraid of Jane Austin?' (a reference to Edward Albee's 1962 play 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?') displays the title of the book made out of a stylised shredded manuscript. Bits and pieces of words and sentences caught my eye: "luck than skill,", "he simply folded himself", "..vy-handed and", "teetered", etc. which I recognised as chapter eight 'The Tortoise Hills' from Gerald Durrell's book 'My life and other animals'.
Why the graphic designer had chosen that author and that book to symbolise the lettering of the name 'Jane Austin' I do not know. There may be some deeper symbolic significance that I have missed. Or perhaps it was just Something they had to hand. Who knows? But, I think that this probably classes me as a bit of a book nerd myself. :/

A quick read and a fun book that should appeal to most people. show less

Not really my cup of tea.