[HN Gopher] On pretending to have read books
___________________________________________________________________
On pretending to have read books
Author : pseudolus
Score : 50 points
Date : 2022-08-06 13:02 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (thecritic.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (thecritic.co.uk)
| Clubber wrote:
| >The sad truth is that we are becoming an illiterate society.
|
| I guess this is the shame hook of the article. I don't think
| we're illiterate, probably the opposite. The amount of knowledge
| I gain by reading things other than books far surpasses the
| amount of knowledge I've gained reading books, and I've read a
| lot of them.
|
| What's the point of reading books? Gaining knowledge. What's the
| point of riding a horse? Travel. Just because one method of doing
| a thing is losing popularity doesn't mean we are illiterate or we
| don't travel.
|
| In fact, I think it's the opposite. I can read a 500 page book
| about a topic and retain maybe 1/10th of it after a year. I can
| read a wikipedia article on the same subject and retain 90% of it
| a year later. The latter is certainly better for a broad base of
| knowledge for the curious.
| marc_abonce wrote:
| Funnily enough, pretending to read a book will almost always make
| you better at these conversations than actually reading the book.
|
| This is something I learned the hard way back in school. Whenever
| I actually read the book/chapter/article I would almost
| invariably do way worse on the quiz or essay compared to when I
| "cheated" by only reading a couple of summaries or reviews.
|
| In fact, I really enjoyed reading Eco's Name of the Rose, but I
| didn't get OP's _palimpsest_ reference and even after looking it
| up I still don 't remember the exact context where this came up.
| I remember the novel more for it's retelling of early Franciscan
| history and the proto-Protestant movements in medieval Europe,
| and not so much for the whodunit mystery plot.
|
| The reason is that a book has so much content that every reader
| will have a completely different takeaway and will remember
| different parts of it. However, most of the so-called classics
| have an semi "official" interpretation and "memorable quotes"
| that you're supposed to bring up.
|
| That's not to encourage people to skip reading books, though.
| Reading some books can be a very pleasurable experience in itself
| in the same way that you wouldn't get the same experience from
| just reading the plot of a musical play or watching it in fast-
| forward.
| technothrasher wrote:
| The best grade on a book essay I got in High School was for a
| book that didn't even exist. We were supposed to read a book of
| our choosing and write about it. I couldn't be bothered (ok,
| ok, I wasn't the best student), so I just made one up and the
| teacher commented that it was the best essay in the class.
|
| As an adult, I've now read a lot of the classics I was supposed
| to have read in High School, and wish I could go back and tell
| my knucklehead past self to just read them, as they are
| actually very good.
| bsder wrote:
| The main problem is teachers not adjusting the books to the
| personality of the student. I often wonder if many US high-
| school English teachers don't actually read anything outside
| of their curriculum literature.
|
| The glory of English literature is that it varies widely.
| Want a swashbuckle? Got it--here's "Ivanhoe". Want a soap
| opera? "Tom Jones". All manner of surreal? Roald Dahl.
| Incredibly dark humor? Late Mark Twain.
|
| Even when someone says "I don't like author <X>.", if someone
| explains what they don't like, you can often find a different
| story that they like just fine.
|
| By contrast, forcing "Pride and Prejudice" or "Wuthering
| Heights" onto a ninth grade teenager who digs surreal humor
| is just going to make them want to give up on reading
| completely.
| quercusa wrote:
| > _wish I could go back and tell my knucklehead past self to
| just read them, as they are actually very good._
|
| I doubt it would have done any good. There's so much in those
| great books that teenagers won't appreciate. You might read
| _Moby Dick_ at that age and think it 's a just story about a
| guy chasing a whale, with a lot of digressions.
| robocat wrote:
| > teenagers won't appreciate
|
| I'm middle-aged, read a lot, but Moby Duck is just about
| chasing a whale to me. I just don't recognise the metaphors
| and deeper meanings, unless somebody with a word rotator
| mind explains it (or I read the Cliff's notes - which I
| didn't get either).
| technothrasher wrote:
| I just felt bad for Melville when I got to chapters where
| he introduced his classification system for whales. He
| seemed so excited by it, and it's unfortunately obvious
| with the passage of time that it was very wrong.
| theknocker wrote:
| mightybyte wrote:
| > Now, over ten trillion new titles hit the shelves every month
| in Young Adult fiction alone.
|
| Say what? Ten _trillion_? That doesn 't strike me as plausible.
| Which raises the question...what is the correct number? Ten
| billion new titles per month doesn't sound plausible either. Ten
| thousand sounds more reasonable. Maybe ten million but that seems
| like stretching it.
| Izkata wrote:
| > Tellingly the first download was The Complete Works of
| Shakespeare -- the next, one of the original bluffer's guides, by
| Charles Lamb. His abridgments were good enough for James Joyce,
| who based Ulysses on Lamb's filleting of Homer. Would the
| masterpiece of modernism have been any better, more highly
| esteemed -- or more readable -- if he'd actually read The Odyssey
| first, instead of just getting the gist? I doubt it.
|
| I know of a modern version of this: When K. A. Applegate was
| writing _Everworld_ , she mentioned in an interview that whenever
| she wanted to introduce a new god or mythology, she made a point
| to never read the actual myths/stories and instead just get an
| overview. That way she wouldn't get stuck on how the various
| mythological characters were previously written and would be able
| to fit their abilities and personalities into the books, while
| still grounding them in what how the myths portrayed them.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everworld
| elliekelly wrote:
| I'd never heard of this publication before but the way this
| article so casually and confidently touted the importance their
| own literary reviews made me feel like I ought to have! I looked
| up their launch editorial[1] (from 2019) and it seems they're
| angling to be a(n ostensibly) "middle of the road"/both sides are
| bad _New Yorker_ with funding from Jeremy Hosking[2].
|
| [1]https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/november-2019/introducing-
| the...
|
| [2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Hosking
| pmyteh wrote:
| I don't read the launch editorial as 'both sides are bad', but
| as a challenge to what they perceive as a sloppy and pervasive
| left-wing 'default' opinion. The 'new orthodoxy' language is
| straight out of the ongoing culture war, in particular.
|
| If they're aiming for a _London Review of Books_ kind of space
| that makes sense - LRB is decidedly left wing if pretty
| heterodox and broad-minded - but for the political commentary
| space I would have thought the _Spectator_ already covered a
| contrarian conservative perspective fairly well. But then I
| guess I 'm not in their target market.
|
| [Edit: I see they have got Toby Young on their editorial board.
| Definitely Conservative (as well as conservative), then.]
| elliekelly wrote:
| I mean the "both sides bad" angle is flatly stated _in_ the
| editorial:
|
| > Ossified thought and a lack of intellectual rigour are
| depressing features of all sides of our political and
| cultural debate.
|
| It's pretty clear they're trying to dress up their agenda-ed
| editorials as "common sense" compromise but if middle-of-the-
| road were truly the publication's aim I can't imagine
| Haskings would have had any interest in funding it.
| havblue wrote:
| Related Onion News Network video: https://youtu.be/fDBzQkWeQ5g
|
| New Kindle Helps Readers Show Off By Shouting Title Of Book
| Loudly And Repeatedly
| karaterobot wrote:
| I thought for sure this essay would reference Pierre Bayard's
| really fun _How to Talk About Books You Haven 't Read_. Oh well!
|
| Anyway, I think there are at least three kinds of reading.
|
| The one where you skim some reviews and read twenty pages is one
| of them. You can do this in order to just be able to say you've
| read something without putting in the "work", but you can also do
| this as part of a serious study of some subject: For example,
| maybe I only need to read a specific chapter in a book to answer
| a question I have, or I only need to check every page that
| mentions a specific keyword related to what I'm studying.
|
| Another way of reading is when you march through a book, page-by-
| page, as quickly as possible. When you get to the last page you
| say "done" and then you move on. A few months later, all you mat
| remember about the book is a outline of the plot, in a novel, or
| maybe one or two important points, in a non-fiction book.
|
| (I think listening to books in audiobook format is another way of
| reading, but in practice it's often very close to this second
| form)
|
| The last one is when you read the book, then think about it, then
| read it again, then read _about_ it, then keep reading it over
| and over for the rest of your life.
|
| The latter is much more rewarding, but my point is not that one
| is better than the other, but that all of these are separate
| activities that can legitimately be called reading. Maybe we need
| more words for reading.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| maybe should mention Pierre Menard who wrote a famous book he
| hadn't read
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Menard,_Author_of_the_Q...
| lysergia wrote:
| It's worth having some form of takeaway from a book, even if
| it's just one profound paragraph that resonated with you, and
| the rest can be filtered out. I mostly read self help, and have
| managed to boil some books down to a little kernel of truth
| that I use daily to help me navigate life. Holding a whole book
| in your head can be done.
| tapanjk wrote:
| > The last one is when you read the book, then think about it,
| then read it again, then read about it, then keep reading it
| over and over for the rest of your life.
|
| Agree. Would love to see examples from people of books that
| fall in this category. I assume it is a short list for most
| people.
| sneak wrote:
| Mine (predictably):
|
| 1984
|
| Stranger In A Strange Land
|
| The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress
|
| Time Enough For Love
|
| Friday
|
| The Crying Of Lot 49
|
| Seveneves
|
| Neuromancer
|
| I've read all of these at least 4 times, with reading-about-
| them in between.
|
| I usually pick one up to re-read just a part of it, then I
| get sucked in and before I know it I've re-read the whole
| thing.
| StormChaser_5 wrote:
| Have you tried "The player of games"? Based on the others
| you have there you might like it.
| jasone wrote:
| I've read eight of the Culture novels now, and "The
| Player of Games" was in the bottom two for me. I'm
| mystified that most others seem to rank this book so
| high. "Use of Weapons" and "Surface Detail" are my
| favorites so far, but they're rarely mentioned here.
| sneak wrote:
| I adore the Culture novels, but I read them for the first
| time last year.
|
| So far I have only re-read Inversions and Excession, the
| two that were the most fun the first time through.
| erulabs wrote:
| For me it's Nietzsche's "Thus spoke Zarathustra". I'm a
| different person each time I get through certain sections of
| that book. That said, I'm sure one of the hundreds of unread
| books I own is equally life changing.
| karaterobot wrote:
| For me, I was thinking of Gene Wolfe when I wrote that. I've
| reread the entire "solar cycle" at least once every couple
| years for the last 20 years, and of course I own all the
| secondary material I can find on it. And I subscribe to three
| different podcasts where people just discuss it. And Youtube
| channels, and mailing lists... I don't think I'll ever really
| get to the bottom.
|
| But it's not uncommon for people to do this with religious
| texts, too. Reading for devotion, for understanding, out of a
| since of obligation, whatever. Doesn't matter: it's a
| distinct way of interacting with books, different from
| reading a potboiler mystery novel.
| quesera wrote:
| I'd also love to see a list of the most common books people
| claim to have read, but have not.
|
| There's some obvious stuff: - Proust -
| Tolstoy, Dostoevsky - Joyce (although to be fair, how
| can you tell?) - Probably David Foster Wallace -
| Knuth :)
| ivad wrote:
| Notes from Underground was the book that really pulled me
| into Dostoevsky (after initially reading C&P and disliking it
| - I doubtless missed quite a lot the first time through).
| Definitely in that category for me.
| berlinquin wrote:
| "I am a sick man... I am a spiteful man." A good hook, but
| I had a tough time finishing Notes. The narrator really
| shows that yes, he is in fact a sick and spiteful man. Not
| one I'd want to pick up again.
|
| I got pulled into Dostoyevsky through Brothers K, which led
| me to Notes eventually.
|
| Do you know what translation of Notes you read? I think I
| read P&V, and if I read it again I'd want to try something
| else
| ivad wrote:
| I've read Garnett and P&V and personally much prefer the
| Garnett translation!
|
| A nice comparison: https://web.archive.org/web/2013110918
| 2920/http://comparetra...
| tomxor wrote:
| > The latter is much more rewarding, but my point is not that
| one is better than the other [...]
|
| I disagree that it's not better...
|
| The "march through a book, page-by-page, as quickly as
| possible" method is wasteful of your time. That just seems like
| a task for the sake of being able to say "i've read it", and
| even if someone is that pretentious, it's a pretty low return
| on investment - I say screw that, you can only read so many
| books in your life, read the ones that genuinely interest you
| at that moment in time. Even if you don't finish or read it
| front to back contiguously without large breaks, at least the
| content is meaningful to you while you read it, so you get the
| most from your time spent reading.
| hinkley wrote:
| I've reread books and if some smartass had challenged me about
| the contents of some of them I would have probably looked a bit
| suspicious.
|
| I've reached an age where some books I've kept because I've read
| twice, I have accepted that I likely won't read a fourth time
| (and also running out of places to put them) so I have made the
| possibly foolish possibly mature choice to start Mary Kondo'ing
| my book collection, with a send off. Read them once more, then
| surrender them to a young person or the used bookstore.
|
| The last and main series I parted with was Dune, which I started
| reading when the first rumors of Villeneuve's adaptation came
| out. My recollection of the last three books was quite different,
| perhaps a reflection of how uptight I was at the first reading,
| where I found the whole Matre story arc to be quite salacious.
| The reread was a quite different experience and I'll be curious
| to see what happens with Foundation, and Thad Williams.
| lolc wrote:
| Eh, if the book is not worth the read to you, why the angst about
| admitting that? Sure, if your job is to read books and write
| critiques on them, your position may be different. Thinking of
| it, it should be admissible to say "I stopped reading for these
| reasons" even for a critic. But what can they write after that?
| It's not going to fill the page, is it?
| havblue wrote:
| By being able to pretend that you've seen a television show you
| won't be left out of the conversation when it drifts towards
| something that people feel passionately about like Breaking
| Bad. With books there might be even more pressure: demonstrate
| your knowledge or you might not get invited for brunch next
| week.
| hindsightbias wrote:
| Have always considered Atlas Shrugged to be the best example
| and anti-thesis too. I've met a lot of people who say it's
| their favorite book but it becomes clear they've never really
| read most of it or finished it under light questioning. But
| it will get you invited to those parties anyway.
|
| On the left, they've never read it and mentioning will cause
| your brunch invite to get lost.
| lolc wrote:
| Haha, I loved reading Rand in my teens. Also Tolkien.
| Somehow people are comfortable with having read the one
| fantasy land, not the other. I guess it's because Tolkien
| didn't write to change current politics. Rand did.
|
| I did relate more to The Fountainhead and We The Living
| though. Atlas Shrugged is too damn preachy. It seems to me
| one needs a good deal of righteousness to think this a good
| book. Yeah, signaling goes a long way there.
| lolc wrote:
| I'm so used to be left out of television show discussions
| that I couldn't imagine pretending. I'm ok not getting
| invited for brunch if that means I don't have to meet people
| that have expectations about the books I read. Creepy to
| think that people feel pressured into that.
|
| Edit: Not disagreeing with what you say. It explains the
| situation of the author rather well. I live in blissful
| ignorance.
| dimitar wrote:
| People ask me why I buy some many books when obviously I haven't
| read them all - I usually ask them if they wear all their clothes
| all the time.
|
| I think it is is perfectly fine not to finish a book. Or read a
| few chapters to see if you like it. Or skip the introductions or
| the notes. Or even just read the notes (I have an awesome
| translation of the Odyssey - the notes are more enjoyable than
| the poem!). I usually don't finish long book series.
|
| I have books that I've collected for another time where I would
| enjoy them. Perhaps a vacation or sick leave.
|
| Point is, there are many ways to enjoy books, and we should feel
| more open about it and less judgemental of the way others enjoy
| them.
| thenerdhead wrote:
| There's a Japanese term for that; tsundoku.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsundoku
| satisfice wrote:
| If I read this it will ruin a good joke.
| icambron wrote:
| I can't identify with any of this--I guess I simply don't travel
| in social circles where reading books confers status--but I will
| say this article is wonderfully written and entertaining
| throughout. In particular, I got a good chuckle out of this turn
| of phrase:
|
| > You don't have to go fully commando, of course. There are
| plenty of briefs available.
| scubbo wrote:
| Oh, wonderful. I was (perhaps fittingly, given the topic)
| skimming, and didn't notice this for the excellent pun that it
| is - I'm glad you pointed it out.
| justinlloyd wrote:
| I've read "quite a few books" in my lifetime. I am not interested
| in having a conversation about any of them. Well... maybe one or
| two. Love Tolkien but boy did he need an editor. For the most
| part, many of the books I read are instantly forgettable. Those
| that aren't, I remember fragments, some bright, salient details
| surrounded by a fog of dullness.
|
| I watched John Carter the movie with my wife a while back, I know
| I read the books and shorts many years ago, I couldn't tell you
| anything about them other than "civil war era soldier" (I think),
| goes to Mars, does some stuff, saves the day, gets the girl (sort
| of). All I could think, after having read the Princess of Mars
| story was about were the plot holes for a few days post-reading.
| Ripping yarns. And then, after years, utterly forgotten. There
| was a few parts in the movie where I thought "Oh, I remember that
| from the book" and other scenes I thought "was that in the book."
| I have no desire to go find out. For all I know I could be
| confounding the John Carter stories with Danny Dunn.
|
| I keep a spreadsheet of all the books I've read or started to
| read. Date started, date completed. There's more started dates
| than completed dates. Any initial thoughts. Sometimes some
| updated thoughts a little while later. Whenever one of the books
| comes up in conversation, I get this uneasy, vague recollection
| that I might have read that. I usually have to check my list.
| People want to show off how clever they are by quoting bits of
| it, or dissecting the story - either they read and re-read books
| for a living, or they don't read very many books, I can't decide
| which it is.
|
| If someone were to question my knowledge on a book I claim to
| have read, I'd look incredibly suspicious. I've found, of the
| people who have tried this gambit, that it is usually someone
| trying to engage in a pissing contest and I'm not interested in
| engaging in that. It also makes tops of your shoes dirty.
|
| P.S. Essayist is a) gatekeeping b) showing off his "I read books"
| Scout badge c) needs a damn editor.
| robocat wrote:
| > People want to show off how clever they are by quoting bits
| of it, or dissecting the story - either they read and re-read
| books for a living, or they don't read very many books, I can't
| decide which it is.
|
| That is a very uncharitable attitude: I suspect you are
| projecting your own abilities on others.
|
| Many people are just interested in books for their own sake,
| and some people are effortlessly good at remembering and
| quoting books.
|
| I do think there are many people that use literary references
| as part of their status signalling, and there are those that
| pretend ignorance (maybe a working class ingroup signalling
| they are not upper class twits). Someone quoting classical
| Greek literature, versus the _oi polloi_ quoting page 3.
| bilater wrote:
| I see the author's point yet there are echos of the old argument
| of 'this generation doesn't do X'. Typically those arguments
| almost always end up being false.
|
| Ultimately, we need to have a little more faith in the younger
| generation, just like our boomer parents could have done with us.
| I bet there were articles in the 50s & 60s freaking out about how
| books are going to go extinct cause young people only want to
| watch TV. And that did happen to a certain extent (readership
| fell), but a percentage of the population kept reading good old
| fashioned books, and that will be true going forward as well.
| kixiQu wrote:
| Is anyone else thrown by the lack of editing here? There are a
| couple things that read oddly but might just be regional
| wordings, but other sentences seem like they can't have passed
| under an editor's nose. Yikes.
| singlow wrote:
| I do generally get annoyed at poorly edited articles, but I
| didn't notice it - examples?
| kixiQu wrote:
| Okay, I'm going to give you a shotgun blast of these and a
| good chunk of them may just be wrong. (It's my birthday, I
| feel crotchety, so out comes the red ink) If I were close-
| reading a text for an important purpose, here are the things
| I'd want to bring to the author's attention:
|
| * "as easily remedied" seems to be an orphaned comparison to
| a parallel structure in an early paragraph that's been
| removed? At least, that's the way I can make it make most
| sense. As it stands: as easily remedied as what?
|
| * "With genres such as "speculative fiction" that used to be
| for comics and cranks now taken seriously, and made-up genres
| like psycho-geography and ethnography sprouting all the time,
| not to mention the world's back catalogue being available on
| one's phone (and of course on-line titles like The Critic
| spewing essential verbiage like a broken main into the
| thoroughfare of discourse 24 hours a day), it is quite
| impossible to keep up or even to tread water." A decent
| editor doesn't let this sentence see the light of print. Even
| setting aside the Gish gallop of off-topic contrarian dinner-
| party remarks, you just... don't need that broken main
| simile. In a sentence that long, you just don't have the
| breath to spend.
|
| * "maintaining well-articulated and informed opinions becomes
| ever more demanding on our time" Well-articulated has to do
| with writing rather than reading, and surely it's "demanding
| of" not "demanding on"? That latter would be one I'm trying
| to assume is a Briticism.
|
| * "The diagnosis focuses on posited aromatic chemicals in ink
| or the ominous quiet that predominates and subconsciously
| reminds us of exam halls." "Predominates" is clear enough
| used on its own, but in this place in the structure, it
| almost seems like it's being applied transitively to "exam
| halls".
|
| * "Now, over ten trillion new titles[...]" "Some, we've
| read." Not all ungrammatical conversational structures are
| bad, but those commas are just odd in places where the
| reading is far clearer without them. It's as if the advice
| that in English one should read a comma aloud with a pause
| had been taken as a bijective map...
|
| * "When I mentioned the theme of this piece, for instance, my
| daughter immediately and shamelessly confessed to having
| recently completed an English essay on a text that she hadn't
| even opened, based purely on the class discussion that she
| had attended on the first day back after a week off with
| Covid." Just split it into two sentences! It doesn't all have
| to go in one!
|
| * "I affected to look disapproving but this, I venture, may
| well prove a more valuable skill set than the one ostensibly
| being tested." The "this" would naturally bind to "affected
| to look disapproving" without the object of the disapproval
| featuring somewhere in the first independent clause.
|
| * "Students have long speculated whether the York Notes
| couldn't tell them all there was to know about Crime and
| Punishment." I can't figure out why "couldn't" is there in
| the negative, since "whether" normally implies both positive
| and negative options.
|
| * "Nowadays even that level of investment, financial and
| temporal, is unnecessary." Commas don't set this off enough
| from the rest of the sentence, so it doesn't read smoothly
| that "financial and temporal" applies to "investment" rather
| than "level".
|
| * "one from say, the LRB or Prospect, just so you know what
| Lefty nonsense someone is likely to spout;" Given all the
| little asides set off with pairs of commas in this piece, how
| was the comma between "from" and "say" missed? Similarly,
| "There are thousands of these of course, but Amazon has"
| seems to be missing a comma between "these" and "of".
|
| * "Pair this with the first twenty pages of the book itself,
| downloaded as a free Kindle "sample", to familiarise oneself
| with the author's stated intentions and stylistic
| irregularities and you are in a better place[...]" You can
| use a general "you", and you can use "one" for the same
| purpose, but to use both in the same sentence is sloppy as
| hell.
|
| * If they're not using the serial comma, is it normal to
| still include a serial semicolon in the same place? Honest
| question.
|
| * "It indicates an insightful, often amusing and pithy
| contribution -- certainly pithier than the books that now
| emerge from the industrial bread-making approach taken by
| modern publishing, to get a decent magazine article up to
| 100,000 words." What are we to make of the comma after
| "publishing"? If the "to get a [...]" chunk was meant to
| attach to the "contribution", wouldn't the comma instead be
| another dash? If it's meant to attach to "approach", why is
| it there at all?
|
| * "Once you've read the "Helpful" reviews, if you want to be
| really bulletproof, scan the three- and four-stars too." This
| is garden pathy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-
| path_sentence) verging on ambiguously structured. Imagine you
| read just this sentence with the "too" chopped off. You
| wouldn't be able to tell whether "if you want to be really
| bulletproof" applies to "[reading]" the 'Helpful' reviews" or
| to "[scanning] the three- and four-stars too." One can
| understand it in context and with the "too", but the sentence
| feels clunky because the structure doesn't reflect its logic
| clearly.
|
| * "Besides, if it weren't for quotation books I doubt many of
| us would know Ralph Waldo from Fitipaldi, Almieri dos Santos
| or Keith." Why no comma to set off the counterfactual
| conditional? If the piece were generally written comma-light,
| I'd get it, but...
|
| * "[...]currently struggling through -- I wonder if you have
| already[...]" Is it a British thing to not use a semicolon in
| this kind of construction?
|
| * "Books continue to flourish as a commodity, but to other
| purposes: as vectors of conversation, signalling and setters
| of agenda." "To other purposes" is unnatural but obviously
| permissible a la "to what purpose". In terms of the content,
| when people talk about books being a commodity, they're
| typically already contrasting that with "books are for
| reading." Also, the sequence there is uncomfortably close to
| a parallel structure but doesn't make it. "[...]as vectors of
| conversation, signals of X and setters of agenda" would read
| nicely, but you can almost get "as vectors of conversation,
| as vectors of signalling and as vectors of setters of agenda"
| from how the existing version parses out expanded.
|
| * "Writing a book is mainly about conferring a degree of
| status on the author, getting her invited to literary
| festivals and onto Front Row." Said aloud it'd be fine, but
| that "getting [...]" just hangs off the sentence.
|
| * "My physical bookshelves are double stacked, with a row of
| books who once had the shelves to themselves, now entirely
| obscured by new arrivals, like an unwelcome development
| spoiling their view." This sentence is structurally mushy.
| "My Xes are Y, with a Z who A to themselves, now B by C, like
| a D Eing their F." Even if we forgive the aroma of comma
| splice unseen, the pronoun resolution here is a mess.
|
| * "A sort of three-dimensional version of the "palimpsest"
| that is well known to anyone who pretended to have read The
| Name of the Rose before seeing the movie adaptation." And
| here we give up on connecting way-too-many-clauses with
| commas and send a subject off into the world to survive sans
| predicate.
|
| * "Meanwhile, I have some 2500 books in my kindle library,
| the vast majority unread. My Kindle library, incidentally,
| can be arranged in order of purchases." Even the worst
| editors correct Brand Capitalization, and here the author
| hasn't even bothered to match. (Also weird not to have a
| comma in that "2500" in the style I'd assume of this kind of
| publication, but it _might_ be a choice)
|
| * "Tellingly the first download was The Complete Works of
| Shakespeare[...]" Tellingly, I see no comma, despite many
| other such initial adverbs in the piece being given commas...
|
| Anyway, this is on the editor (or absence of editor). There's
| very little here that I'd think the author should feel bad
| for not catching. Writing and rewriting your own prose -
| especially reading it aloud to yourself with the inflection
| you intend - numbs the eyeballs to many such things.
| Renevith wrote:
| I'm not the person you replied to, but this stood out to me:
|
| "And so (sorry, Orwell, but my guilt is too great to avoid
| the passive voice) certain strategies have evolved."
|
| This sentence isn't in the passive voice. ("Have been
| evolved" would be.) I would expect a good editor to be a
| grammar expert and catch that error.
| singlow wrote:
| Agreed, syntactically. However, it is passive in that the
| strategies aren't actually the actors. The word _evolved_
| has a general passive use while actually retaining the
| active voice syntactically. The actual passive voice
| version you gave is not normal usage. The author is the
| actor who has developed strategies, but he is dodging the
| responsibility by making the strategies be the subject of
| the sentence and leaving himself out.
| kixiQu wrote:
| The "passive voice" is a term with a technical meaning in
| grammar. "Evolved" used intransitively doesn't qualify.
| This is the kind of thing an ordinary person mostly
| shouldn't need to care about, but if you're going to
| reach for the cutesy editor joke...
| v4dok wrote:
| My mother used to read a lot of books when I was young so I
| picked it up as a hobby. I have to say that after the internet
| came into my life, reading books has become much harder. The
| effort is much bigger because my brain was wired to faster reward
| cycles.
|
| I continue pushing thought but I have to admit it's still hard.
| Especially because books that worth it are hard. They are not
| something you mindlessly consume like a movie or (in a lesser
| degree) a theater play. I don't know how people manage to read
| hard books when they also work on something even somewhat
| challenging on a day to day basis.
|
| So yes, faking you read a book is stupid and easily recognizable
| to someone who actually did, but on the other hand, any way to
| shorten the effort needed to read books is welcomed. Especially
| when they are so many produced now with SEO-like content that
| just waste your time.
| 1sembiyan wrote:
| A 15 year old niece told me this week that she can't be bothered
| to read because she gets bored by the time she gets to the end of
| the first page. "Why do that when I have TikTok and YouTube?"
|
| It seems like there's going to be a generation of people who
| don't have to pretend to read - they simply don't care to, and it
| doesn't confer the same status TikTok fame does.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| It was the same in the previous generation. Not reading school
| assigned books isn't new to gen Z. People were considered way
| more odd if they did read the books. Even more so if they said
| they enjoyed it.
| sneak wrote:
| I am fairly certain that that has held true for a majority of
| people in the previous generation (and the ones before that),
| too.
|
| Most people don't read. This is not remotely new.
| swayvil wrote:
| To be fair, reading a book and engaging in a conversation about a
| book are two utterly different bags. And engaging in a
| conversation about a book is often way more fun. And shifting
| gears between the two modes is difficult. So you really can't
| blame people for faking it.
| havblue wrote:
| I've noticed that Wheel of Time can be very fun to complain
| about: the plot goes nowhere fast, there's too much gender war
| dialogue, too many characters are belligerent idiots. But
| people still read it and talk about it, passionately. So it's
| still somehow engaging despite or maybe even because of the
| flaws.
| swayvil wrote:
| In my age and wisdom I find that I can't get through a even a
| quarter of what I read these days. At best. 29 times out of
| 30.
|
| I throw it aside exclaiming, "what crap!".
|
| If it weren't for free blackmarket epubs I would have wasted
| a fortune.
|
| Where have all the good sci fi writers gone?
| neilv wrote:
| If there weren't black market epubs, would that be one
| component to market forces doing their thing for high-
| quality content?
|
| Related example, on a different factor: yesterday, I paid
| $51 for a nonfiction non-DRM .epub form of a book that was
| also available for $27 in ereader-specific DRM form. Had I
| instead pirated the book, that _wouldn 't_ have contributed
| to publisher incentive to offer non-DRM form, but that
| presumably _would 've_ contributed to the publisher wanting
| hard DRM lockdown.
|
| (Or, I suppose, might've contributed to the publisher
| focusing on other factors than high quality, such as large
| volume, to bring it back to the earlier question?)
| swayvil wrote:
| Here's some high-quality legal free scifi.
|
| There is no antimemetics division, fine structure, etc :
| https://qntm.org/fiction
|
| Friendship is Optimal :
| https://www.fimfiction.net/story/62074/friendship-is-
| optimal
| thenerdhead wrote:
| I think Neil Postman hit this point in his arguments regarding
| the death of the written culture when showbiz was born in the
| late 1800s. The culture shifted with technology to become either
| a prison or a burlesque.
|
| With the latter idea in mind, he argues that there's no solutions
| for these problems as most people do not believe it's a problem
| that needs cured and secondly it's a problem unlikely to be
| fixed, only to be innovated upon.
|
| > "that [people] were laughing instead of thinking, but that they
| did not know what they were laughing about and why they had
| stopped thinking"
|
| Books can be some of the highest quality sources of information
| in today's age. Especially titles like Postman's who had warned
| about these issues in the 80s building upon the work of McLuhan
| regarding "The medium is the message" arguing that mediums are
| not neutral and can have us ignoring the shifting landscape
| underneath our feet by unwittingly consuming junk content.
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