Sometimes I just have to say, “what the fuck?” and the royal we doesn’t work as well. These are my thoughts—raronauer

In college, pretending to have read books was a necessary skill. There were papers to write, tests to take, and in between, keg parties to crash.

But since I’ve graduated from required reading, my free time is finally free. If I wanted to spend all my non-work hours playing Mortal Combat 2, that would be weird, but still my choice. I end up reading books and magazines because I enjoy to, not because I have to.

But lately, people have been acting as if every dinner party is a giant pop quiz. A new book and Web site are designed to get people sounding smart without actually doing any of the work of being smart.

Brijit is a site with 100 word summaries of lengthy magazine pieces. (Full disclosure, I used to work with Brijit’s managing editor, Bryan Keefer.) Frank Ahrens in The Washington Post writes, “Just scanning Brijit could make you the smartest person at your next cocktail party.” There must be a layer of hell with cocktail parties filled with people talking in circles about the magazine summaries.

The site appeals to the kind of person who thinks the purpose of great magazine journalism is the conversation afterward, not the pleasure of reading it. In other words, the site is for the pretentious and the lazy.

I don’t care for baseball, but I loved Ben McGrath’s profile of agent Scott Boras. I read the piece because I like Ben McGrath, not because I foresaw an awkward moment at a dinner party where everyone was discussing it. Brijit’s summary is accurate, but not fun at all to read.

My general strategy for talking about a book I haven’t read is to say I haven’t read it, but soon this social problem will be solved too. How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read is coming out in America and offers tips to appear to have read books you haven’t read.

But here’s a newsflash: you don’t have to read anything anymore. So don’t fake it. Just change the subject.