3 ms·
Sounds more like the author just had bad experiences with non fiction? There are plenty of non fiction books which are good and where the book doesn’t just feel
by Insanity 2y ago
Sounds more like the author just had bad experiences with non fiction? There are plenty of non fiction books which are good and where the book doesn’t just feel like filler. Some that come to mind quickly :
- bad blood (about theranos)
- SPQR
- King Leopold’s Ghost
- Lost in Math
- masters of doom
- iLoveOncall 2y agoYeah I think the author is just talking about personal development books, not non-fiction as a whole.
- Insanity 2y agoYes, the “self help genre” might be more accurate. The author is painting in broad strokes for his post sadly.
- xxr 2y agoYeah, it sounds like the author is referring to the “thoughtlord” strain that evolved out of self-help over the last decade or so.
- zoklet-enjoyer 2y agoI've never heard that term. Basically self help disguised as unbiased information or what?
- quchen 2y agoA good example is "the subtle art of not giving a fuck". It's a book where the author rediscovers stoicism, badly, hidden within a chapter where they use "fuck" a lot. Reading any amount of say Seneca will be better, but Seneca is terse and dead for more than 70 or so years, which isn't a very good business case.
- xxr 2y agoI just mean the fluffy thought leader/influencer junk that doesn't go much deeper than the obvious
- zoklet-enjoyer 2y agoTuring's Cathedral is another great one
- Insanity 2y agoYup for anyone interested in the history of computing I highly recommend that one as well.
- InitialLastName 2y agoI just wish he had applied a little bit of curation to his research before he put them on the page. Insight into the way the design team worked together is fascinating; recitation of cafeteria menu pricing is not.
- zoklet-enjoyer 2y agoYeah, I listened to the audio book and there were some sections where I completely zoned out
- jsharf 2y agoHe's not saying that all non fiction is bad, just that the incentives are misaligned, and to be fair at least in my experience, there are a lot of popular non-fiction books where each chapter is repetitive, and I feel the whole thing could have been written in 2-3 chapters, if publishing a 30-page nonfiction book wasn't taboo
- jokethrowaway 2y agoNon-fiction is a bad term. An historical account is not fiction (because it happened) but it read as well as a fiction book. Agassi's biography would be another example.
- A_D_E_P_T 2y agoThere's non-fiction (historical accounts and pop-sci explainers) and there's non-fiction (here's how you ought to behave.) Obviously SPQR, but also Bad Blood is a historical account, and it's interesting. Most business books are of the "here's how you ought to behave" variety. Most of these were written to win the author consulting gigs. The vast majority are formulaic and bland. Also, to hit a publisher's wordcount/shelf-space targets, they're always heavily padded. 99.9% of them would be better off in much more concise bullet-point format. Of course there are a lot of edge cases and books that don't fit neatly into any category. And there are some books, like the Hagakure, Meditations, and the Bible itself, which started off as clear-cut examples of "here's how you ought to behave" but later became historically important.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- nottorp 2y agoIt's about those self improvement books that in 99.99% of the cases can be summarized in one phrase. Unfortunately you can't print and bind just one phrase because no one will pay for it... or will they?
- karaterobot 2y agoHe's not talking about books like that, I think he's talking about things pop sci and management books, but struggled with a way to describe only those books and not anything else that falls under the broad hemisphere of non-fiction. You could say that he's begging the question ("books I think are the problem are, in fact, the problem") but I immediately felt I knew the kind of book he meant, so I was not confused by it.
- fmajid 2y agoHe's talking about how these books are padded with unnecessary filler material because people expect a nonfiction book to be a certain number of pages.