Sunday, September 16, 2012

one-trick ponies and other literary crimes

My reading is usually "all over the place."  I read blogs and the studies/articles to which they link; i read vintage fiction for relaxation; i read esoteric material from respected sources; i read a few modern writers of nonfiction; i read LOTS.

One thing i resent, however, are the books that say the same friggin' thing over and over and OVER, so as to have enough material to fill a book, and it's been my sad experience to do that lately.  "Fiber Menace" and "The Carnitine Miracle" fall under this heading.  Read the website, and google the subjects, and you'll waste less time and money.

Then there are the ones which should be considered primers for the uninitiated.  The reason i HAVEN'T ordered "Primal Blueprint," "It Starts with Food," and a number of others is, i don't need to be told the basics AGAIN.  I've skipped so many paragraphs in "Primal Body, Primal Mind" after reading the first sentence....  The "body" half of the book told me almost nothing new, and enough that i disagree with, that i'm not sure i'll be able to believe what i read in the second half (the "mind" part), about which i know significantly less.

I haven't finished "Excitotoxins" yet, and it's been months.  It is singularly unreadable, even though he presented plenty of material.  Not so "Good Calories, Bad Calories," which some people complain about due to the large amount of material -- some authors CAN, and others CAN'T write worth a damn.  I "breezed" through GCBC in a very short time, like the first time i read "The Lord of the Rings."  Nonfiction doesn't HAVE to be dry and unappealing.

I suppose i should go to amazon.com and leave reviews, though i can think of a thousand more attractive ways to spend my time.  Before i buy books, i generally read the highest and the lowest reviews, to get a hint of how they please various audiences -- that's one of the best features of the site.  If only there were a ranking system:  THIS is a 101 sort of book, and THAT is a 301....

I wonder if you can sell back a Kindle book?

9 comments:

  1. Amen tess. So many people write "books" which are nothing but glorified collections of blog posts with one or two good ideas and a lot of bullshit to beef it up to book length. I must say I don't bother with any of this stuff. I have read GCBC, WWGF, Phinney & Volek's New Atkins (horrible) and the two Art & Science of LC Living/Performance books (excellent). GCBC is obviously seminal but in terms of practicalities, the two Art & Science books are seriously the most informative and clinically useful books anyone's ever written about LCing. I also read a couple of books on the cholesterol fraud and a couple of books on paleo (Jaminet, Robb Wolf and Cordain's first book) to see what it was all about. There is nothing in these books that isn't available online for free. Blogs like Hyperlipid and Woo taught me infinitely more about LC than any guru.

    Don't get me started on the cookbooks.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. LOL! when i had finished writing this, it occurred to me that i hadn't mentioned cookbooks at all.... i guess i need to read P & V next, huh?

      Delete
    2. I don't know if you do since you're an expert. I mean, when I read their first book I was a noob. Still, those are the books I felt had the most useful practical information about things like protein grams, supplementing minerals etc.

      Delete
    3. Oh and forgive me for spamming but what also gets on my nerves is people writing a second book only a couple of years after their first. What earth-shattering revelations do they have to share with us that they didn't know at the time? The Eades are the worst offenders with their shitload of bogus books.

      Delete
    4. multiple replies aren't spamming, from you and my regular internet interlocutors -- netlocutors? -- i'm no expert, just a stubborn reader with enough time available to indulge myself! :-) yeah, series of books without new material is just LITERARY spamming!

      Delete
  2. I think many newer books now are just written off powerpoint outlines. There is a sometimes-interesting intro. Of course, the non-interesting introductions are just putting the powerpoint slides into sentence form. Then there is a section explaining each powerpoint bullet. Dreadful! I don't have a kindle, since I still read real books. The e-books are too linear. I would need a huge kindle with a split screen and a thumb in the index in order to be happy.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. :-) i don't have a kindle either, but my laptop has the PC application, so i get my instantaneous gratification rather than having to wait for REAL books to arrive.

      makes a lot of sense, what you write about modern nonfiction -- no wonder that newer "books" are hardly worth reading at all! in college when it became apparent that i'd never get into veterinary school, i left my technical studies and transferred to my first love, literature ... so i'm kinda a snob!

      Delete
  3. I am one of those that constantly reads blogs and books covering things I already know. I know I'm wasting my time, but I just have some sort of compulsion to do it, thinking I will find some new nuggets. I need to change this behavior.

    ReplyDelete
  4. not necessarily, if it still "works" for you! (i reread a lot, too.)

    :-) i was mostly crabbing about the "ponies" and that Gedgaudas book which had been so highly praised, and which i'm finding old-hat.... i'm HOPING the second half will be better than the first, though after she wrote what she did about protein, i'm finding her less than perfectly credible!

    ReplyDelete