Be selective when choosing a book to read

There are countless books out there, with more coming out every year. This number would only keep increasing at an exponential rate now that AI is also a prevalent tool. Not that the human equivalent of ghost writers didn’t exist earlier.

I’m generally not a person who critiques things like books harshly. If the book was decently written I enjoy it. Simple as that.

Why care?

This is kind of obvious but

Books consume your time and energy

There are so many books that are just plain outright bad. They will use up your time and energy, and more importantly your enthusiasm and then end up offering you NOTHING in return.

The reason you decide to read a book is because you have certain expectations of that book, be it the entertainment from reading a fiction book, or the knowledge from a technical book. Sometimes books give us something other than what we expect, like a life lesson from a fantasy fiction book. But some books just fail at giving you anything of value. I’m talking Zero.

I would go so far as to say that some of these authors have some awareness on how bad their books are but publish something anyway. It is a complete lack of respect for the reader.

Books can waste your time

So many books being published nowadays especially in certain domains such as self-help are just derivations and dilutes of previous more dense and useful books. I don’t have proof but sometimes I feel passionate enough about this to start compiling some evidence.

Some books are just derivations of older books

I understand why this is done, it is meant to make difficult books more digestible to the average person.

But I suspect this has unintended side-effects. Some of which are

1. The book ends up being lower-quality
2. The book doesn’t challenge you - This probably contributes to people becoming less articulate with language.
3. The knowledge is more dilute
4. You lose a lot of the nuance

I believe that the closer you are to the source of the idea, the higher the chance (not a guarantee) that you get a more complete understanding.

The book derivation issue mostly is for non-fiction books. With fiction books I feel like it’s more difficult to judge what a good book is, since there is a subjective component involved in it.

How do you be more selective?

Some things you can do to avoid issues like this is to read some reviews from diverse sources. I have personally found the following sites like Reddit, Twitter, and strangely Tiktok. Even just googling around for five minutes will do wonders.

But also keep in mind that even the best of books have bad reviews. I have personally read so many books that I have seen bad review about but enjoyed reading them and would consider them good books.