How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read

Benedict Evans: It's funny. I'm, I'm, I have a draft thinking about like what LLMs do to web search and publishing and discovery and e-commerce and like big, foot of hand wavy fuzzy all of that stuff. And I was sort of thinking about this and there's a book written by a French academic sort of 20 years ago or something called "How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read," which sounds very kind of, um, snide.

Um, but kind of his point is that like there's the book you read when you were 17 and you really didn't get it. And if you read it now, you'd get it. And there's the book that like he's got this kind of list of like, there's the books that everybody else has read so it's to say you've read them. There's the books that like you've read three other books by that writer so you don't really need to read this one too. Um, you get it like you do need you know, do you need to read another Malcolm Gladwell book like if you you've kind of got the Malcolm Gladwell experience.

So there's this sort of generalized sense of pattern and accumulation of what you've seen, what you've half seen, what you've half remember. There's also I think you know what your, your, your viewers, listeners might notice is I I kind of have two modes, two or three modes. I have a mode that's sort of discursive and slightly rambling and free associating and I'll kind of spiral off in different directions and hopefully come back to the point. Um, and then there's a mode where I want to try and pin the thing down and break it apart and say what are the two, three, four things that are happening here, which is what you see in the slides.