Books Worth the Ride

Which books do you actually need to read, and which are better simply to look at and talk about?

First, can we all just confess: what’s a book you like to talk about but have never read? I have many. One is Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Sure, I’ve tried to read it—I’ve read many parts of it, even—but I haven’t even come close to having “read” it. Yet that has never stopped me from talking about it.

I love to talk about books I haven’t read. There…