It might be thought that a book reviewer needs instruction in the skill specified in the title of Pierre Bayard’s book about as much as a moose needs a hat-rack. But cynics should know that the few people who are guaranteed to read a book are, in fact, the last people to be paid to do so. After the agent, the editor and the copy editor, the book reviewer picks up a book like this and reads it carefully from beginning to end, making notes as he goes.

None of those people, however, are reading in any kind of normal way; during the industrial process of book production, the level of intricate attention paid to the text produces an experience which is nothing like real reading. A good copy editor will be acutely aware of the words, the sentences, consistencies of plot and so on in a way very few, if any, subsequent readers will ever emulate. But the questions of the larger effects of the book, its longueurs and excitements, will enter into his head only in a marginal way. He has not really read it at all. Only a degree of carelessness and neglect is ever going to produce a real reader. Not-reading, in short: and that is M. Bayard’s subject.

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