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Rules for Choosing Nonfiction Books

herman.asia

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Re: Rules for Choosing Nonfiction Books

#131

Post by misiti3780 »

cfmcdonald wrote: post #74
misiti3780 wrote: post #2

Interesting post, but i would say you can easily read more than 3000 books if you retire at 65 and live to be 90+. Also there are great non-fiction books by journalists that are not about journalism, a few that come to mind are Bad Blood, The Chickenshit Club, Angler, All The President's Men, books by Matt Taibbi, etc.

For similar reasons to the "time value of money" concept, books read now are worth more than books read in the future. e.g. reading GEB at 20 and having it change the course of your life to become a Computer Science Ph.D. is very different from reading it on your death bed. Moreover, 3000 books is still only scratching the surface of all non-fiction ever published in English (let alone other languages), so strong heu…

good point

Re: Rules for Choosing Nonfiction Books

#132

Post by awillen »

I think the journalist rule is good for books that go deep into a topic, like many of the ones you've cited here. On the other hand, I would expand your caveat around biographies to say that journalists are generally very good when it comes to writing about events.

Barbarians at the Gate is a good example of this - it required authors who were able to dig deep into _what_ happened. There's obviously some info on why things happened there as well, but the primary purpose of the book is to inform the reader of what occurred, which is a good use of the journalistic skill set.

Re: Rules for Choosing Nonfiction Books

#134

Post by Emma_Goldman »

pvg wrote: post #124
Emma_Goldman wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You said, if you are incurious about something, you ought not to make sweeping statements about it. I was challenging the premise, i.e. that I'm incurious about non-fiction books. I don't, by that way, think the claim holds up. It's perfectly possible to be incurious about something and to make a sensible general statements about it (e.g. 'all ducks have wings'). Hence why I told you to engage with my reasoning. I ne…

You can't really logic-puzzle your way out of 'if you are unfamiliar with books written by journalists, you're not in a good position to make worthwhile pronouncements on books written by journalists'. It's not even an interesting thing to try and dispute.

Easy:

1. The reasoning holds independent of how much I have read. 2. I'm not unfamiliar with books written by journalists.

Re: Rules for Choosing Nonfiction Books

#135

Post by tptacek »

arkades wrote: post #118
tptacek wrote: post #16

John Carreyrou wasn't an expert on phlebotomy or biochemistry. Roger Lowenstein wasn't an expert on hedge funds or technical finance. Eric Schlosser on nuclear command and control? Nope. Woodward and Bernstein and constitutional law? Not so much! I don't think these are very good rules. I thought it was especially amusing that this person doesn't trust journalists to write about anything but journalism. If you believ…

> John Carreyrou wasn't an expert on phlebotomy or biochemistry. Roger Lowenstein wasn't an expert on hedge funds or technical finance. Eric Schlosser on nuclear command and control? Nope. Woodward and Bernstein and constitutional law? Not so much! So, your argument against a rule of thumb - a broad, sweeping heuristic never meant to account for all possibilities, and by definition not to account for outliers - is th…

There are good rules of thumb (don't check malloc return values for NULL, just blow up when malloc fails) and bad rules of thumb (no function should be longer than 60 lines).

"Don't read books by journalists that aren't about journalism" is a bad rule of thumb.

Re: Rules for Choosing Nonfiction Books

#136

Post by scott_s »

tynpeddler wrote: post #93
e1g wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me it's the opposite: for example, I had watched countless videos on "disruption" but did not fully grasp it until I read The Innovator's Dilemma. The same holds true for theory of constraints vs reading The Goal, Robert Cialdini's works on influence, Richard Dawkin's views etc. In all cases, I thought I understood the material before reading the original source, and in every time the books blew me away. Perhaps…

I think you're hitting at the dichotomy of knowing vs grokking. A lot of powerful concepts have high level summaries that can trick the audience into thinking that's all there is to it. Chris Voss's excellent "Never Split the Difference" comes to mind. A lot of his negotiating strategy can be boiled down to "develop a mutual and deep empathy with your negotiating partner". On some level this makes intuitive sense; pe…

Put another way: it can be easy to gain an understanding of a particular goal, but very difficult to develop a deep understanding of the systems that allow you to achieve that goal.

Re: Rules for Choosing Nonfiction Books

#137

Post by tptacek »

prlambert wrote: post #130
gordon_freeman wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This method does seem limited. I have read some of the best nonfiction books from Journalists over the last few years: Vance's biography of Musk, Stone's biography of Bezos and the books from Issacson including Job's biography. Author's missing all these NF books due to his disdain for the journalists.

Did you read the post? He specifically calls out biographies as the exception to the 'no journalists' rule and describes why journalists are well suited to write bios. In other words there's no reason to believe the author would miss any of the books you mentioned by his "journalist disdain".

Speaking of things specifically called out, the HN guidelines ask you not to write the words "did you read the post".

Re: Rules for Choosing Nonfiction Books

#139

Post by neaden »

yoran wrote: post #9

I would add #4: books that are at least 10 years old. I feel like knowledge has to pass the test of time. This rule would rule out "Why We Sleep" for instance, but you'll be able to read it in 10 years if the science behind it still stands.

This seems a bit silly. An analysis of British/EU relations that was written 10 years ago is going to be missing some pretty relevant things that have happened since then for instance.

Re: Rules for Choosing Nonfiction Books

#140

Post by dtornabene »

Emma_Goldman wrote: post #123
dtornabene wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Journalism was literally his only livelihood. He was a journalist/editor years before he even conceived of the theories that spawned Capital, and he did it for the rest of his life. His first newspaper was actually shut down precisely because of his journalism on the question of the rights of poor to gather wood in forests owned by the crown and nobles. He went on to write for at least 3 other papers/journals that I…

If you read Gareth Stedman Jones' biography of Marx, it's very clear that there was a persisting shortfall between whatever income Marx acquired via journalism - which was, in any case, fluctuating - and the outgoings of his family. He depended upon regular support from Engels, among others.

oh for sure. I've read a couple of collections of his correspondence, specifically with Engels and its replete with pleas for money. That being said, his only real job, his only job, from university til his death was journalism, and he did quite a bit of it and absolutely relied on it for income along with Engels (and others) donations. Like, journalism makes up close to 3(?) volumes of his collected works.
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