The Trouble with Books

Condense your thoughts!

Rob Henderson writes,

It’s true that passive reading isn’t a good way to retain information. But active reading is. Jot notes in the margins, pause and try to reformulate an interesting argument in your own words, write down brief summaries, regularly connect what you’ve just read to your existing base of knowledge, etc.

I read a nonfiction book anticipating that I will write a review. I mark passages that I might want to quote in yellow. I mark passages that I think might represent the main theme in light blue. And if I decide that a book is not worth reviewing, I stop reading it.

Also, I read a book from the outside in. I check out the material on the cover. I read the introduction and the conclusion. Then I read the book.

When I finish writing a book review, I will often say to myself, “There! Now nobody has to read the book. I’ve boiled it down for them.” We would be better off if authors did that work themselves.

David Samuels, literary editor of Tablet, whines,

The article was an old-fashioned feature that had taken me months to report, then perhaps six weeks to write, plus another six to eight weeks to edit and rewrite with the help of capable editors, copy editors and fact-checkers who helped give the magazine prose of yesteryear its distinctive glossy finish.

…Why did a text that read so well in galleys read so shambolically online?

He blames computer technology for ruining reading. I think it is fair to say that distraction is a pathology of our times. But we are not going to return to a pre-Internet culture, not should we.

Books and magazines evolved when printing and distribution costs were high. This meant that consumers had limited amounts of material to read, so that as a writer you could take your time getting to the point.

Computers and the Internet get rid of printing and distribution costs. The most important scarce resource these days is the reader’s time. You can complain about that all you want, but I recommend adapting to it instead.

Henderson links to Andy Matuschak, who writes,

Picture some serious non-fiction tomes. The Selfish Gene; Thinking, Fast and Slow; Guns, Germs, and Steel; etc. Have you ever had a book like this—one you’d read—come up in conversation, only to discover that you’d absorbed what amounts to a few sentences?

…books are surprisingly bad at conveying knowledge, and readers mostly don’t realize it.

My hypothesis is that books do not have so much knowledge to convey, at least relative to the number of words. I say that books often lack information density. In the past, writers could get away with this because time was not so precious.

When I go back to a book that I enjoyed 20 years ago, I often find it frustrating. So much throat-clearing! So many digressions! So many attempts to sound hip or clever!

When I am supposed to give a talk, I practice for many hours over several days. The talk gets shorter and shorter as I go along. Usually, I can condense it to less than 15 minutes. If book authors were to go through the same exercise, we would end up with more short essays and fewer books.

Occasionally, a book can be information-dense because it presents many empirical observations. Jean Twenge’s Generations comes to mind.

But it is hard for a book to be information-dense in terms of ideas. If you have one really important idea, why does it require a whole book? And if you have several important ideas, chances are that readers will miss some of them, or else not remember them. Better to put the ideas into separate essays.

I believe that 99 percent of nonfiction authors should not be writing books. They should write essays on substack, and then see whether or not they have a book. Razib Khan, writing about genetics and the history of populations, definitely does have a book. Robert Wright, working on a project about cognitive empathy, might not.

Books like Guns, Germs, and Steel or Thinking Fast and Slow turn out to be bumper stickers with hundreds of pages attached. Your aspiration should not be to write one of those. Your aspiration should be to condense your thoughts into a good substack essay.

substacks referenced above:

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