Take a minute and think about all of the books that you will read in your life. Imagine a large room, books stacked floor to ceiling - everything you've read. Now imagine outside of that room all of the books that you will never read - they line the halls, choke the doorway and cascade down the front steps to a sea of tomes that looks endless down the street. As a reader, those books are as good as having never been writ. You can know of them, but without sampling between the covers you can't really know them.

Now imagine the Alexandria library. Before Caesar puts the torch to it. All those books, all that knowledge, those stories. And then it is gone. We can mourn the loss of those books, but what do we really long for? The potential? We don't know what they contained. We just want to make that loss personal. Like all those books we won't ever read. I've resigned myself to the fact that I probably will never read all of Dickens, and to me, they may as well have been in that Alexandrian blaze.

Reading is an adventure in solipsism, a personal quest that we can occasionally run parallel with others, but in the end what we decide to read - and how we receive it - is uniquely our own. If you are with me so far, then you are in the No, and you are aware that your reading life isn't just everything you have read, it's everything you won't read - whether by conscious decision or by running out of time.

In his brilliant un-novel, Vila-Matas wants to add to the "legion of No" those authors, like Bartleby, that Preferred Not To. Some wrote a novel, or two or three, and then stopped writing for a long time, some of them forever. Others are novelists that never wrote. Is that such a thing? Does an author need a book to become as such? Vila-Matas's hunchbacked narrator shares with the reader his footnoted Bartlebyan thesis of the No, and when you read this book, you just might come away with re-definitions, new filters. I know I did.