How to Judge a Book Without Even Reading It

Do you think librarians read all those books they buy?? Heck no. Yes, collection development librarians rely heavily on library review journals, but you can pretty successfully judge a book before you even read the intro. And how!

1. Try a Little Intellectual Snobbery

Basically with this you need to try to smell out the people who are saying “I’m not a historian but…” when they start their books. Who wrote this thing and why? Is this a historian going for tenure, is this maybe a historian trying to write more popular history, is this a historian at the end of their life putting out a magnum opus, is this a journalist? Who published it, academic press or regular press? Does this person have Something to Prove with this history book?

Now, I’m a little leery of recommending this method first, because I’ve seen some pretty shitty books published by big academic houses from heavily degreed people, and I’ve seen some very nice historical work put out by tiny publishers you’ve never heard of or self-published, and written by people who just decided to write a book because they cared deeply about the history of something that few others cared about. Good work absolutely stands on its own merits, and independent scholars are important animals in the academic ecosystem. But there is a correlation here, and not necessarily a causation, between academics working with academic publishing houses and the production of rigorous history, and you can lean on it a little.

2. Give it the Vulcan Citations Pinch

Flip to the back of the book. Where does the actual book stop and the endmatter start? Basically the more endmatter the better. You want maybe a good solid half centimeter of paper between your fingers, preferably more. If you start seeing appendices in addition to citations and index that’s very good.

3. Scope-to-Cred Ratio

This one’s hard to quantify but basically, the more modest the book’s scope the more modest of arguments and credentials the author needs to pull it off. So a book about say the importance of paperback books for soldiers in WWII, this is a pretty modest scope, and it’s not making any very bold claims, there’s no real reason to be suspicious about the arguments made in this book, although it’s absolutely a popular history work. A book trying to explain the history of everything, get suspicious.

4. Read the Intro

Okay after the first three bits you’ve decided this book has merited your attention enough to open the thing. The intro to a book should give you the outline of the major argument and you can decide whether the argument passes a basic smell test of not being total bullshit. If you find the argument compelling and you want to see how they are going to argue it in the knitty gritty, it’s time to commit to checking out/buying the book and seeing what’s up. (Intros are usually available for new books on Google Books or Amazon previews.)

4b. Read the Acknowledgments

You can tell a lot about a person from their acknowledgments section. I’ve seen books where the author specifically thanked the ILL staff of their local library. They should ideally be thanking an archives or two if it’s a modern history book, because that means they’ve done Real Research.

5. Have a Good Idea of How One Does History

This one takes a little time investment, but having a basic idea of what makes a good historical argument and what makes a bad one will serve you well for judging any history book, from any topic. Maybe just spend some time on the logical fallacies section of Wikipedia. Just knowing to run away when you hear someone start yammering about glorious progress or indulging in extended hero-worship will serve you remarkably well in the history section at Barnes and Noble.

6. Nothing Wrong with Reading a Bad Book

Okay, so you did all this pre-judgement and you still managed to read a real turd. Ah well. You always can learn a lot from something done poorly. They’re a certain grim joy in hating a bad book, especially if you get to feel smarter than an author, so just treat yourself to a really firm critical dismissal of the work. Maybe leave a real stinker of a review here on a Saturday or /r/badhistory.

You are a socialist, right? Now I may be a reactionary, but I can say that one admirable feature of historical socialist movements was their belief in the capacity of poor people to uplift themselves culturally even amidst conditions of toil and poverty. I can't imagine any of those socialists saying that the poor have no recourse but to sedate themselves with intoxicants and distractions. And how strange that a life of hopeless drudgery, malnourishment, a crippling shortage of "mental bandwith", or whatever, didn't prevent turn-of-the-century miners from becoming far more well-read and cultured than most middle-class people are today, all in a world without Google Books.

It's amazing to me that after all this time and after so many people analyzing the books word-for-word we are still finding things like this from books published years ago. I've read a lot of stuff and this is the first I've seen this. I kind of wish there was a version of the books where everything was annotated like a Shakespeare play or a companion guide like they have for Joyce novels like Finnegans Wake that makes note of every little thing. I know there are podcasts and blogs but how cool would a book like that be?

Romance novels have always been the most popular most popular and bestselling genre. Another popular romance writer, whose book was not so different from 50 shades, is getting an 8 figure advance for her next book. If you're interested in understanding the draw of romance novels, there is a very interesting text, though from the 1980s, still feels very true today.

So the question is not really "What is the draw of the 50 shades" series, it's "why did 50 shades become more popular than all of its peers"? Regardless, romance/erotica writers are making bank today, especially because they write very prolifically.

Are they equating criticism with actual book burning? The logical gaps are so big it's hard to follow.

>Where they burn books, bodies will soon follow.
Time and time again this has proven true. From ancient Greece to 1940s Germany. Only this time it's digital media.

Yeah dude that totally happened in America before, they burned so many bodies.
Ignoring the physical/digital and ACTUALLY BANNED/NOT BANNED differences that only an idiot would dismiss, of course.

My man, this book was written for you.

https://www.amazon.com/All-Things-Shining-Reading-Classics/dp/141659616X

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You can get the gist of it in this interview.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpQHxJQrg1E

But I do highly recommend the book as the authors use Wallace in the same way you described. They ultimately contrast Moby Dick to Infinite Jest and suggest the answer to the meaning crisis might share something in common with the worldview of the Iliad.

​

I'll check out your essay on Monday when I have the time.

​

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There's a really classic study of the romance genre, and women's reading habits, that takes this argument apart. It's worth a read.

People of the Book is almost pornography for bibliophiles. This book had me seriously considering going back to school to learn about document preservation.

I went through a period of wanting to read a lot of books about books about a year ago. I think I even have an old submission in r/books on the same subject. Here are a bunch of books I still have on my amazon wishlist that date to around that time. This will be a shotgun blast of suggestions, and some may be only tangentially related, but I figure more is better. If I can think of even more than this, I'll edit later:

The Man who Loved Books Too Much

Books that Changed the World

The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

How to Read and Why

The New Lifetime Reading Plan

Classics for Pleasure

An Alphabetical Life: Living It Up in the World of Books

The Library at Night

The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop

Time Was Soft There

I have even more around here somewhere...

Edit: Ok, found a couple more....

Among the Gently Mad: Strategies and Perspectives for the Book-Hunter in the 21st Century

At Home with Books: How Booklovers Live with and Care for Their Libraries

Candida Hofer

Libraries in the Ancient World

The Business of Books: How the International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read

A Short History of the Printed Word

Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption

Medieval Illuminators and Their Methods of Work

The Book on the Bookshelf

A History of Illuminated Manuscripts

Bookmaking: Editing, Design, Production

Library: An Unquiet History

Understanding Illuminated Manuscripts: A Guide to Technical Terms

A Passion for Books: A Book Lover's Treasury of Stories, Essays, Humor, Lore, and Lists on Collecting, Reading, Borrowing, Lending, Caring for, and Appreciating Books

A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books

And yet I still can't find the one I'm thinking of. Will get back to you...

Fuck yeah, I found it!

That last is more about the woman who own the store than about books, but it's awash in anecdotes about writers and stories we all know and love. Check it out.

People do need something to live for and meaning. And that meaning can't come just from working and making money and buying shit.

Not saying you have to turn to god though either. You should read the book

https://www.amazon.com/All-Things-Shining-Reading-Classics/dp/141659616X

Interesting philosophy book.

Umberto Eco's Six Walks in the Fictional Woods is a very accessible introduction to thinking about literature in a way that blends narratology and semiotics. It generally sticks pretty closely to talking about the stories he has in mind, so I wished while reading it that I'd had a copy of Gérard de Nerval's Sylvie on hand, among others.

David Lodge's The Art of Fiction used to be popular as a supplementary textbook in creative writing classes because it just uses nice examples to provide a basic language for talking about literature.

John Sutherland has a number of books intended for a general audience that either introduce basic concepts of literary criticism or that just make careful reading fun, e.g. How Literature Works, A Little History of Literature, and The Literary Detective: 100 Puzzles in Classic Fiction (an omnibus edition of the books he's probably most well known for).

Gaston Bachelard comes to mind as someone who, like Gass, is just a delight to read: The Poetics of Space, Air and Dreams, etc. I'd put some other writers writing about their personal relationships to reading in a similar category: Nicholson Baker, U and I; Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary; and even Alison Bechdel, Fun Home.

> You would be surprised how powerful an argument based on non-judgement is to a group of people whom have been brought up with the idea of "may he who is without sin cast the first stone".

You're such an ameteur. Jesus did not tell people not to judge.

> Your hedonism, which you so decry, does not seem to be having a notable effect on the human species other than to make weekends more enjoyable.

If you were to read this book, you would learn that the working-class of the 19th century were far more educated than those today. Hedonism and anti-intellectualism are bound tightly, like two rotten peas in a pod. I'm sure you've lamented the dreadful level of political discourse... Well, you indirectly support it.

Moreover, it is well known that people are generally less happy than they used to be, despite huge increases of personal wealth. Huh, I wonder why that is... Certainly nothing to do with the fact that we live in a spiritual wasteland.

> In those societies where the protestant ethic was not so brutally imposed on the populace and they have a far more balanced idea of hedonism - surprise surprise - they do not have this problem.

You don't appear to even understand what the Protestant Work Ethic is. A country with a Protestant Work Ethic would have no problems with hedonism; work itself would be pleasing.

It’s more of a writing book than specifically worldbuilding, but Maps of the Imagination by Peter Turchi might appeal to the cartography fans of this sub.

The Long Walk was a work of fiction. I enjoyed the hell out of it when it was published, but since then there has been a lot of interested readers doing research.

Read "[Looking for Mr. Smith]
(http://www.amazon.com/Looking-Mr-Smith-Greatest-Survival/dp/1626365415/ref=sr_1_8?ie=UTF8&qid=1459265463&sr=8-8&keywords=looking+for+mr+smith)" by Linda Willis to gain insight into Rawicz's story and its true origin. After reading this book I've had to join the chorus of people who believe that Rawicz was actually somewhere else during the time of "the walk" and had cobbled together his tale from what he'd heard others talk about.

These are the books we used in my creative writing classes a couple years ago:

On Writing Short Stories

The Everyday Writer

The Art of Fiction

I highly recommend On Writing Short Stories. The other two were ok, in my opinion, but this one is pretty much a "one stop shop" that I still use today.

Those are questions with many different and widely debated answers. This book by Habib, Modern Literary Criticism and Theory: A History, and this one by Parker, How to Interpret Literature: Critical Theory for Literary and Cultural Studies, are two fine resources. Parker's book is a little more basic and introductory.

I hope that helps.

It's almost certainly based on this book which to be fair, is somewhat original in its approach.

I actually read it early on and consider it formative if for no other reason than unintentionally demonstrating the uses and limits of biographical criticism in philosophy and ideology.

I'll give you a few suggestions based on what I've read.

A good introductory book that covers many different literary theories is Peter Barry's Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory (http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Theory-Introduction-Literary-Cultural/dp/0719079276/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1452013996&sr=8-1&keywords=beginning+theory). His chapters on Cultural Studies and New Historicism, as well as the other chapters, are very accessible.

Robert Dale Parker's How To Interpret Literature: Critical Theory for Literary and Cultural Studies (http://www.amazon.com/How-Interpret-Literature-Critical-Literary/dp/0199331162/ref=sr_1_8?ie=UTF8&qid=1452014126&sr=8-8&keywords=cultural+studies) focuses on major literary movements since the 1930s, and it is one of the more accessible books about the newer forms of literary theory.

Catherine Gallagher's Practicing New Historicism (http://www.amazon.com/Practicing-New-Historicism-Catherine-Gallagher/dp/0226279359/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1452014436&sr=8-1&keywords=new+historicism) is an excellent and easy-to-follow-without-being-condescending introduction to this area of literary theory.

Since your interests are the founding fathers, you're probably in luck, as an excessive amount of work has been done on them. Many of their personal correspondences were kept, personal libraries maintained, and there's extensive historical work on them.

If any, the founding father who will most likely have philosophical works will be Thomas Jefferson. Looking at his personal library, it doesn't seem he had read Kant directly, but he had a book (published 1801) which explained Kant's philosophy. I also see Baxter, Locke, Hume, Berkeley in his collection. So it doesn't seem like Kant had an influence on the founding fathers, he was late to the party for that.

In any case, there seems to be decent historical work 1 and plenty of compilations of letters 2 3, books explicating their philosophy, and the like. I would be careful to avoid books with an obvious political slant and stick to academic texts (i.e., written by a person holding a PhD).

As far as the example with Samuel Clarke, any detailed, academic book on the history of philosophy should cover that.

I highly recommened All things Shining. It makes a very interesting case for Moby Dick.

It is a major undertaking, and this sounds strange that you might want to read a book to interpret another book but I'd also recommend the Tindall guide as a companion. It helped me through it.

I remember reading this https://www.amazon.co.uk/Intellectual-Life-British-Working-Classes/dp/0300153651 a few years ago and i honestly think it's still roughly the same but getting worse. That's why I'm leaning more towards the theory that bots are leading the most gullible down this road. Things don't just flip around from autodidactism to complete idiocy without a BIG push.
My little sister watched The Truman Show in Religious Education at school the other day. I think we haven't seen anything yet... but i remember at school we didn't even have R.E. most of the time and when we did we watched rubbish TV shows, shouts to the Vicar of Dibley.

Ayn Rand had some really great tips about overcoming writers block: http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-Fiction-Writers-Readers/dp/0452281547

lol I'm 27, and Library at Night is one my favorite books about books.

Not that that makes your comment any less hilarious ;)

yw douche-bag:)

>A product of ten years of research and support from leading American and European universities, A Universal History of the Destruction of Books traces a tragic story: the smashed tablets of ancient Sumer, the widespread looting of libraries in post-war Iraq, the leveling of the Library of Alexandria, book burnings by Crusaders and Nazis, and censorship against authors past and present.

>With diligence and grace, Báez mounts a compelling investigation into the motives behind the destruction of books, reading man's violence against writing as a perverse anti-creation. "By destroying," Báez argues, "man ratifies this ritual of permanence, purification and consecration; by destroying, man brings to the surface a behavior originating in the depth of his personality." His findings ultimately attest to the lasting power of books as the great human repository of knowledge and memory, fragile yet vital bulwarks against the intransigence and barbarity of every age.

Adler was an odd fellow who had odd ideas about literature and reading, as Alex Beam details in this excellent bit of cultural history: http://www.amazon.com/Great-Idea-Time-Curious-Afterlife/dp/B0027VT07O

In retrospect there's a bit of hyperbole in what I've said. (hyperbole is so hot right now - Trump)

By 'internal world' I mean your inner thoughts. Think of your mum; that world. (is it really your mum in that world?). Introversion.

> Jesus changes the prohibition of all the outward actions mentioned in the Hebrew Law into the prohibition of the inner thoughts of those actions. Paul emphasizes what was later put down by Matthew, that “thoughts [of] murder, adultery, fornication, theft, perjury, slander— these all proceed from the heart; and these are the things that defile a man” (Matthew 15:19). In so doing, he switches private inner feelings in general from the margin of one’s life to one’s central concern.

That's a quote of a quote from All Things Shining, which was a reasonably interesting read. So while, at the time, people did have an 'internal world' it wasn't nearly as important as the 'external world'. Your outer actions were the only thing to be judged. god was outside, not inside like he is now in most western religions.

Personally I think that inner world has become more and more prevalent in the human experience as we've invented writing, literacy has become common, and now we have television, the internet and so on. I mean most of us communicate mostly by text now; words in our heads.

If you go back even further there was no concept of the inner world at all. At some point humans must have become what we now call 'self aware'. Prior that there was no 'self'.

A really cool, illustrative example of how differently humans have thought throughout time, how different cultures and morals and ethics and people's lives were, is that we didn't even have the concept of the colour blue until fairly recently.

/coffee rant! phew!

I'd like to add that Jesus (real or not) probably wasn't the only one coming to the same conclusions, he was just famous for voicing them. Not unlike Darwin and the theory of evolution; there were many people publishing the same at the same time.

tl;dr human thoughts evolve over time collectively. We are part of a collective consciousness that has a history.

Dating handwriting is a difficult thing, but, the important thing here is the presence of some characters from 'secretary' hand. (Look at the 'Secretarie Alphabete here http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/ceres/ehoc/alphabets.html ). In general, you'll find secretary forms being used very commonly up to the 1630s or 40s, and less universally (but still often) in the later decades of the 17th Century. It would be very unusual to see it at all in the 18C. The main conclusion you can make is that the annotator was most likely roughly contemporary with the printing - getting more solid than that would be a chore. And I think a quill would at this point would be correct; wikipedia says fountain pens are starting to get used, but I still think it's most common to make your own quill and ink. (Check this out for more detail http://www.amazon.co.uk/Western-Writing-Implements-Age-Quill/dp/1872477003/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1383010783&sr=8-1&keywords=western+writing+implements ) .

Ah, so h e and r don't stand for anything - it's just that they are some of the letters that have a more distinctive 'secretary' style.

I think (and I might be wrong) that one of the reasons such books survive because the common quality of paper back then was just so much higher than it is now, at least in big print-runs. Whereas a modern paperback would go brittle and yellow in less than a decade, that just doesn't happen so quickly with early modern books.

The whole idea of renaissance annotation has been a big growth industry, (at least within academia!) in recent years. Here's a book on the subject that's genuinely interesting http://www.amazon.co.uk/Used-Books-Material-Texts-ebook/dp/B00DPBKJWK/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1383010543&sr=8-1&keywords=used+books+sherman .

It's pretty rare to see posts or queries on here that I'm equipped to answer with anything resembling specialist knowledge, so I guess it's just nice to have the opportunity to be useful! Rare books are kind of difficult to get a working knowledge of without prolonged exposure to them, and not everyone has had that opportunity.

Peter Turchi wrote about this in http://www.amazon.com/Maps-Imagination-The-Writer-Cartographer/dp/1595340416. I don't know if it's germane, as this book deals as much with composition as criticism.

I have some but depends on what you want

About planets:
http://www.amazon.com/Planet-Construction-Kit-Mark-Rosenfelder/dp/0984470034/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1286906911&sr=1-2

About languages:
http://www.amazon.com/Language-Construction-Kit-Mark-Rosenfelder/dp/098447000X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1268637297&sr=1-1

i dont know about it too much but heard its good:
http://www.amazon.com/Maps-Imagination-The-Writer-Cartographer/dp/1595340416

This is THE deal:
http://www.amazon.com/How-Write-Science-Fiction-Fantasy/dp/158297103X

Another helpfull thingy:

http://www.amazon.com/Strata-Terry-Pratchett-ebook/dp/B003NX6Y6U/

Nice reply. I really would stress the technical definition of capitalism (private ownership of the means of production, with the goal of profit), because it allows a lot of useful investigation. Still, i like your thinking that capitalism is about the weekends, and it got me curious.

I was taught in school that the two-day weekend was invented by Henry Ford, along with a whole raft of worker benefits, and that we have him to thank for every free Saturday. I found this Politifact article that lays out a more detailed picture, and suggests that Ford was simply responding to the pressure of a decades-long campaign by workers. Also, it points out that the now-standard work week (8 hours a day, 40 hours a week, Saturday and Sunday off) was not formalised in the US until 1940, well after Henry Ford’s time.
This suggests that we owe our weekends of luxury not necessarily to generous employers, but to the organised struggle of workers.

If we look further back in history, we might see that industrial capitalism has a history of very long work days, with very little holiday. I actually work on the grounds of a mansion in an old mill town. The employer and their family lived in the grand house, on top of a hill, with a view down to the river where the mills ran. The slope is terraced by small houses, built to house the mill workers, and which used to be slums. In the 18th and 19th centuries, there was very little legal protection, and the workers endured shifts up to 14 hours a day. Child labour was employed in some parts, and there are accounts of beds ‘never getting warm’ because, as soon as the father would get home, the mother would get up to work. Wages were generally very poor, and children would often suffer from malnutrition.

Some really good info on this:

Very good book

An overview of working conditions

It’s vitally important to note that the factories, the mills, the looms, were all privately owned, and operated for profit. It was in the interest of profit that wages were low and the work day was long. This powerful motive is still present today.

The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (Yale, 2010) is excellent. As the title suggests, it isn't primarily about what people's bodies did day to day but about what their minds did: "This landmark book provides an intellectual history of the British working classes from the preindustrial era to the twentieth century. Drawing on workers' memoirs, social surveys, library registers, and more, Jonathan Rose discovers which books people read, how they educated themselves, and what they knew."

Well, solidify the idea you want to convey first, then, make a map or something so you can travel through all those characters you like to create, place them, on the stories, fiction, non-fiction, western, drama, etc, etc,
some things that may help you:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-Fiction-Writers-Readers/dp/0452281547

http://www.amazon.com/On-Becoming-Novelist-John-Gardner-ebook/dp/B00AB7NYZU

http://www.amazon.com/The-Writers-Journey-Structure-Edition/dp/193290736X

Best book for screenwriting IMO: John Yorke's 'Into The Woods'

And best book for writing (which gives valuable, but indirect lessons in screenwriting) IMO: Ayn Rand 'The Art of Fiction'

Hope this helps!

Not quite, but I appreciate it. Heard a lot about that book. I actually just found this, which looks like the exact thing I was searching for.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Little-History-Literature-Histories/dp/0300205317/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1520025194&sr=8-1&keywords=history+of+literature

This might be it, but would be interested in other suggestions

I recomend a refersher course in The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes