How to Write About Books You Haven't Read

Seven Cents Aug 24 2024: How to Write About Books You Haven't Read

1. "I have not read the original 1818 version," writes Elisa Gabbert, in her essay comparing the two editions of Frankenstein.

2. Come on, Gabbert, it's a 260-page monster book, and you're a professional literary critic. Surely you can handle perusing the actual novel about which you're writing an essay (to be published by FSG for $18 a copy)?

3. "I've never read the books," begins Gabbert's essay featuring… Gossip Girl. As usual, not having read a book doesn't stop Gabbert from writing about it. It's okay, she's special. She's Chuck Bass.

4. "I would never read it cover to cover," she writes of Sylvia Plath's journals. Okay, Gabbert, but let's say hypothetically you were writing an essay about them. Oh, still no? Okay.

5. "I was tired and didn't feel up for Proust." Hey, Gabbert, I can relate! Maybe that's why everything you quote occurs in the very first section of the first part of the first volume of In Search of Lost Time. Lots of people stop reading Proust after a few dozen pages, but most don't publish essays called "Proust and the Art of Suffering," in which they sort of skirt whether they actually finished the book or not. But you do.

6. "When I stopped rereading books, I didn't stop rewatching movies." Maybe this is why the only piece of art that receives a four page plot summary in this alleged collection of literary criticism (and even then it's not clever critique or astute analysis, just a high school plot summary) is… the movie Point Break.

7. The beautiful painting ("The Passing of Time") on the cover is by Jess Allen. June Park incorporated it into one of the year's best book designs. All this for the dumbest book I've read in months. Yes, I read it. Every stupid word. So who's the dummy now?

Elisa Gabbert: Any Person is the Only Self

FSG 2024 $18 230 pages