On a literary blog a while back – but I can’t remember where and I can’t find it – a scholar wrote that he had a “5-year rule.” After 5 years, he wouldn’t talk authoritatively about a book he had read because he could almost never remember it well enough.

One of my colleagues from my Masters’ class is notorious for talking about books he’s never read. It took us nearly a year to figure it out, but he had hardly read anything even though it seemed he had read everything. His secret is that he worked in a bookstore for years and you absorb a lot of incidental knowledge of books that way whether you mean to or not. It doesn’t hurt that he has all the academic jargon down either.