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"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?" Of course, t
by Finnucane 3y ago
"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?"
Of course, the few sentences you can recall are not going to be the same for all readers; you can't say, that was the most important point for everyone. I mean, can you imagine the editor of say, Richard Rhodes' Making of the Atomic Bomb saying, no one will remember this bit about Lise Meitner's escape from Germany on an expired passport, you can cut that.
If you, as a reviewer, think that your review has really encapsulated everything anyone would get out of the book you're reviewing, you're either the greatest reviewer ever or an arrogant delusional dork.
- sn41 3y ago> If you, as a reviewer, think that your review has really encapsulated everything anyone would get out of the book you're reviewing, you're either the greatest reviewer ever or an arrogant delusional dork. To be fair, many recent non-fiction books are just bloatware version of a single blog article. While no one can summarize "War and Peace" or "Critique of Pure Reason", it is certainly possible to deflate a lot of these non-fiction insight porn books back into an original length blog.
- esafak 3y agoThat's partly because your memory is limited and that's the best you could do. Someone else will remember more. Certainly for dense, academic books. For pop-science and business books, being able to distill it down to a sentence or two is a reflection of its long-windedness.