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TeraWhat's avatar

I'm a little surprised how therapeutic reading this was. I really needed somebody to give me a good reason to not stress about all the important non-fiction that I haven't read - I probably already have gotten the most important ideas from the most influental books already. The main stress-reducing idea I got from this is treating reading non-fiction books like verifying the information in the primary source. I'm definitely going to appreciate second-hand information about books, like book reviews, even more than I did before. I really appreciate you having done this review about Bayard's book (HB++)

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estera clare's avatar

Thank you for this review! Without really thinking about it (except to occasionally feel guilty that I'm acting like I've read a book I haven't) I've long approached reading from this perspective. There are a great deal of authors I understand well from hearing them referenced over and over, and on the flip side, many primary sources I read and would have been lost in if not for some kind soul's background and annotations. Sometimes I feel nihilistic, pondering the immense mass of books around me that I'll never reach – and why should I ever want to contribute, when there's far more worthwhile things than I could ever produce? – but viewing the world of books (and blogs, etc.) as a conversation greater than each individual tome is both more heartening and, I think, truer. For one example of collaborative reading: recently I saw a deeply annoying and poorly written book getting praised to Heaven and back on Twitter. I immediately knew the leftist tradition the author was coming from, and had in fact met a person or two like him before. I tried reading the book and couldn't get more than a few pages in, the writing was so bad, but I told my girlfriend and she read the whole thing. She took notes and told me about it and we wrote a review together. Through her notes I identified the pop science the author had engaged with (on the most surface of surface levels) because I had seen that pop science, and the misinterpretations, thereof. It was the most I've ever read a book without reading it, though the shallowness helped. A lot.

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