The Only Objective Litmus Test For Book Quality

How often have you been in the shoes of the nameless, hypothetical person below?

A reader grabs their Sunday edition of The New York Times and skips ahead to the famed New York Times Bestseller List. At the top of the list is a book the reader heard their friend Dave mention the other day.

“Oh yeah, XXX is totally awesome,” said Dave. “It’s the book everyone’s buzzing about. I thought it was good too.”

The reader is impressed by the glowing reviews from other beloved authors.

“An essential read!” bleats Jane Austen. “Perfection on every page!” cries Charles Dickens. “Made my moustache flutter!” bellows Mark Twain.

The reader is so encouraged that the next time they go into a bookstore (or airport coffee stand), they immediately buy a copy of XXX. However, their reading experience is terrible. The writing is turgid, the characters asinine, and the length stretching to infinity and beyond. How many pages are there in this thing?

They put the book down, disappointed.

What went wrong?

The Boundary of Taste

Let’s not kid ourselves, we’ve all been this hypothetical reader at some point in our lives. There seems to be a book gaining traction in the media and among our friends. We go and give it a read, and quickly realise it’s “not my cup of tea”. Whatever the reason, we don’t like this book and can’t comprehend why anybody else likes it either.

It’s just not to our “taste”, like so many other books we tried to like but didn’t. But what the hell does that mean? Are book judgements only about taste? In most cases, yes. Certain books are clearly written for some people and not others. For example, most children’s books are written for, well, children! Few adults would find any pleasure in reading a middle-grade novel with a twelve-year-old protagonist with a twelve-year-old’s problems. We’re done with middle school, high school, and probably college. But if your teenage cousin needs a book for their birthday, you’ve got no problem buying popular a middle-grade novel as their present.

Adult genres operate in a similar fashion. Books about being in a homosexual relationship might not stir any emotions in straight readers, but it could easily be considered essential reading among the gay community. There’s nothing wrong with this either. Same thing for Romance novels, aimed at women whose husbands are not Carlos Casanova; for crime novels, which interest some people and not others; and literary fiction, which interests wannabe intellectuals and nobody else.

But like my hypothetical reader, our reaction isn’t always this benign. Sometimes, we slam the book down in disgust. “What chowderhead of a publisher signed this book?” When we can’t get with the program, we feel annoyed. “Why do people like this book when I don’t? What am I missing?” And yet, the explanation of “oh, some people just have different tastes” feels totally unsatisfying. There has to be more to it than that.

And there is.

Ask Yourself One Question

When engaging in art criticism, we all have an intuitive sense of what’s good and what’s bad. We hear Miles Davis and think “that’s amazing!” We watch the movie The Room and laugh at how terrible it is. But we can’t really say why this art is good or that art is bad. When eating at a fancy restaurant, we can’t say why the baked potato soup tastes funny. It just does. Nobody except the most expert of chefs would say “this soup tastes funny because the milk in the broth is several months past the expiration date and now I’m going to keel over from salmonella poisoning”. But in both cases, the amateur and the expert are correct: the soup tastes bad. That is an objective fact.

It’s the same thing for books. Subjective taste is one thing, but objectivity matters just as much even if you can’t put your finger on it.

Well fear not, because I’ve solved the objectivity issue. Here’s the only objective litmus test for judging the book you’re reading:

Did you understand what you just read?

That’s it. Did you understand what you just read? If the answer is no, stop reading immediately. A text you can’t understand is an objectively bad book that slipped through the cracks. Just like how the physicist Richard Feynman was fond of saying “if you find yourself saying ‘I think I understand this’, it means you don’t”, failing to comprehend the text in your hands is a damning indictment of the author. It means they have not listened to their editor, not consulted outside sources, and reject clarity of prose for fear of sounding “simplistic” or “talking down to their reader”. Whatever insecurity led them to being incomprehensible, they have committed a grave sin against the idea of civilisation.

Unpacking The Rule

The starting line of book criticism is always clarity. No exceptions. I draw a hard line. If you can’t understand a book, you can’t say why it appealed to you (or not); you can’t interpret any meaning from the text; and you can’t gain any of the benefits that come with reading.

To be clear, you can understand a book perfectly well and be completely bored by it. This is a true matter of subjective taste. For example, one book that was enthusiastically recommended to me was David Epstein’s Range. However, as I laid out in this blog post, I did not end up sharing that enthusiasm with the masses. That book was frustrating to read, but at no point did I find myself saying “I don’t understand this”. I understood every sentence in Epstein’s text, but it didn’t appeal to me. However, that’s not to say that it won’t appeal to you. Nothing wrong with that.

However, my experience reading Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook was…rather different. First published in 1962, this book is about a woman named Anna struggling with writer’s block in 1950s London. The book is divided into five sections that go in the following order. First is the section (chapter?) called “Free Women”, which involves Anna doing…I don’t know what. Again, I couldn't understand the damn thing. She has a friend named Molly who is divorced from a man named Richard and has a son named Tommy who reappears often in the book. After the “Free Women” section comes the following: Black Notebook, Red Notebook, Yellow Notebook, Blue Notebook. Only because I read the back cover do I know what each notebook is for. The Black Notebook shows Anna’s recollections growing up in Rhodesia, then a British colony; the Red Notebook shows her political (read: communist) beliefs; the Yellow Notebook details her “emotional life” (whatever that means); and the Blue Notebook acts as a diary.

This process of Free Women followed by four notebooks repeats itself five times before giving way to the titular Golden Notebook which, allegedly, ties the whole thing together.

I’ll be blunt: this book made no f&%king sense. Anna is never an active character as the whole book is composed of these notebooks. Adding to the confusion is that she once had a lover who is referenced several times under different names in the different notebooks. Just look at the wikipedia page’s character list. Anna appears in the novel not only as herself, but acts as the basis for the characters she herself has written. So the character of Ella in the Yellow Notebook is actually Anna, but the Yellow Notebook is just Anna’s thoughts and projections meaning none of the characters in these sections actually exist! In other words, not only is there no linear structure to this book, there is no consistent plot thread period. Each “notebook” tackles a different theme in a different order, which throws the reader off balance. The Free Women section/chapters are only a fifth of the book, yet make up the entirety of Anna actions in the present…and still they don’t make sense. I don’t understand it!

The Golden Notebook is a bad book. That’s not a matter of opinion. It is bad, and to say otherwise is wrong. Full stop, no exception.

And now, the real caveats to the rule.

With comprehensibility as the objective baseline for judging your reading material, surely you’d be right in thinking that there are edge cases with fuzzy boundaries. Maybe there are, so let’s explore them.

The first caveat comes from certain non-fiction categories. More specifically, abstract subject matter. It is no secret that I am terrible with mathematics and, because of my autism, am less tolerant of abstraction than most people. So when I read James Gleick’s The Information, a surface examination would yield a negative result to the comprehensibility question. I didn’t quite understand the subject, a history of information, and I still struggle with it. So did Gleick fail the objectivity test?

No, he didn’t. Why? Because my weakness with abstraction is not applicable to the next reader in line. I understood the prose perfectly well, but because I am less talented with that kind of science, I can’t repeat back to you anything about the book except that it was about the importance of Information Theory as well as a general history of information itself. Even me doing that shows I took something away from it. Other more scientifically minded people would have no problem with this book. So The Information fails a subjective taste test. Abstracts subjects are not for me, but I’m glad I gave the book a try and would have no qualms recommending the book to somebody who needs information about…information.

The second caveat comes from age inappropriate reading. Note, inappropriate in this circumstance does not refer to children reading erotic books with lots of drinking and cocaine snorting, but rather children and teens reading any book designed for an adult audience. This is a temporary exception to the rule. If you somehow managed to convince an eleven year old to read Gone With The Wind and asked them “did you understand it”, them answering negatively doesn’t mean it failed the objectivity test. Children are not adults, don’t have the vocabulary of adults, and are still growing into adults. The same applies to teenagers, which is why I think giving high-schoolers books like Great Expectations might be inappropriate in some instances. This is not because I think they shouldn’t be reading great literature, but because I reckon they might not be mature enough to understand those books. That last example is me cheating a bit as I’m drawing on personal experience. I skipped Great Expectations in high school and only read it a few months ago. It was a difficult read, but I understood it perfectly well. Then again, I read a book once every ten days as 22-year-old MA student. I don’t think High School Elliott would’ve been up to the job. That’s also not to say that a high schooler can’t understand Great Expectations. If they understand it and like it, great! No complaints here.

Conclusion

No person has ever read a book that they don’t understand and enjoyed it. Confusion and loathing have an intimate relationship. Filing tax returns is awful because it’s a confusing form (not to mention the feds are taking your money). Setting up a new computer infuriates people as they don’t understand why isn’t working as advertised. Being confused isn’t fun and feeling like you shouldn’t be confused when you are confused only adds to the initial anger. In the literary world, these are the feelings which lead people to walk away from reading.

The baseline of whether or not a book is good isn’t “Did I like it?”. That’s debatable and subjective. Rather, the baseline is “Did I understand it?”. That’s not debatable and definitely not subjective.

The Book That Missed Its Own Point: Range By David Epstein

For some time, I’ve considered writing a blog post about the usefulness of Amazon book recommendations (or lack thereof). On the one hand, I’d be dead in the water without my Kindle. On the other hand, I’m completely baffled by some of the recommendations Amazon sends my way. More specifically, some of these recommendations repeat themselves even though I’ve told Amazon I’m not interested in them.

One book continued to appear on my radar screen despite my efforts. However, Amazon wasn’t the only entity to bring up this particular book. Ryan Holiday interviewed this book’s author for his Daily Stoic website. Listeners of another podcast I enjoy, Deep Questions with Cal Newport, also frequently brought the book up. Since this wasn’t just an Amazon recommendation, but a book recommended by two different writers I respect, I decided to give it a whirl.

The book is Range by David Epstein.

Range is Epstein’s second book, but the topic of his first book might help to explain the topic of the second. The first book is called The Sports Gene, which is a logical extension of Epstein’s “career” (shudder quotes deliberate—more on that later) as a writer for Sports Illustrated. I’ve not read that book and thus have no grounds to praise or criticise it. The only reason I mention it is because the topic gave me pause.

“Why on earth is a sports writer jumping over to pop science after only a few years between the two?” The shift in topics didn’t raise my eyebrow, his timing did.

And as it turned out, my eyebrow would stay cocked for the entirety of the book.

What’s In It, Pros and Cons

Epstein’s book is an ambitious one given the current cultural zeitgeist. For the past decade or so, countless books, no doubt started by Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, have been pushing some variant of the “10,000 rule”, the idea that 10,000 hours of practice is the time it takes for someone to become an expert in a particular domain.

Not surprisingly, such a position comes with a ton of caveats, asterisks, and other assorted footnotes. Epstein is taking Gladwell and others in the 10,000 hour camp to task for these caveats.

With that in mind, what exactly is in Epstein’s book? In addition to pushing back against the 10,000 rule (sort of), Epstein tries to make the case for having “range”( i.e. numerous skills). The results are bizarre.

And that leads me to the main point of this review: David Epstein undermined his own book by advocating the position he did.

Epstein’s Position

Epstein’s clearest objective in this book is pushing back against the idea of “specialising” early and in one particular subject. The performer Epstein uses to illustrate this “specialist” line of thinking is Tiger Woods, who famously began golfing at two years old and went on to become the best golfer in the world.

Epstein indicates that this kind of example is the exception, not the rule. Instead, most experts followed a path similar to how Roger Federer became the best tennis player in the world. Federer tried his hand at a bunch of a different sports before settling on tennis. According to the 10,000 hour philosophy, Federer shouldn’t be the best tennis player in the world because he didn’t start as early compared to his peers.

Therefore, Epstein’s book tries to make the case for a “Federer style” of success by examining the newest psychological and performative science about the virtues of having “range”. In the process, Epstein makes some excellent points about the dangers of being too narrow. Chief among these dangers is “over-specialisation”.

In many fields, most infamously academia, there are some practitioners specialising in a subject so niche and individual that nobody can benefit from them. These people are worse than useless, according to Epstein. For example, English professors these days might not be studying “Victorian Literature”, a reasonable specialty, but rather “The Underlying Grand Narrative In The Works Of Charles Dickens in 1843 and 1844 Compared To Marxist Theory.” Admittedly that is an exaggeration, but people of that mould are becoming increasingly common.

Another excellent critique about doing things the “Tiger Woods” way relates to the importance of a “sampling period”—the incredibly common phase whereby people test out several interests before they land on the right one. Federer, for example, sampled with just about every sport available before throwing his lot in with tennis. Specialising too early can lead to stagnation and frustration later on down the road.

Still another excellent critique of the “narrow” path relates to the nature of modern work. Perhaps Epstein’s strongest argument for not doing things too narrowly has to do with the “kind” vs “wicked” nature of modern work. The quoted words are specifically related to the types of work environments most people find themselves in. A “kind” environment is found in arenas like chess, tennis, and golf, where the rules are defined and there is an objectively correct outcome (practice your swing to get that hole in one, checkmate your opponent).

“Wicked” environments by contrast are found in places like Wall Street, where the rules are constantly changing, the idea of success is tough to nail down, and creativity is a constantly changing requirement. Being too specialised will serve one poorly in such an environment.

I could go on and on as Epstein is eager to share every possible argument for this “ranged” way of going through the world, but that is exactly Epstein’s problem.

And Then He Undermined His Own Book

With his unique argument and promising research, Epstein’s tome should be the easiest book to recommend. There is just one problem: by being the epitome of “range and generalisation”, Epstein’s writing style is nowhere near up to the standard needed to make his point in the clear, convincing, and sophisticated manner demanded by his subject matter.

It would be hypocritical of Epstein to write a book advocating “range” if he himself didn’t have a ranged background and boy does he ever. He was initially a science major who wound up in the Arctic to study the local fauna. Then he shifted into a journalism MA at Columbia before trying his hand as a crime writer for a New York newspaper. Following another shift in his life, he became a sports journalist for Sports Illustrated which led to his first book, The Sports Gene. After critiquing Malcolm Gladwell and having a debate with him about the 10,000 hour rule, his interest shifted again, this time to psychological science. That in turn, led to this book about generalisation.

What’s wrong with this biography? Writing skills take years and years to develop in a deliberate way, exactly in the specialist manner Epstein argues against. By jumping around in all of those different fields, Epstein undermined his own book by writing it in a less-than-optimal way.

And this non-expert performance shows. In the above section, I listed three points from Epstein’s book that stood out to me but they are barely scratching the surface of the anecdotes, interviews, and scientific studies Epstein has commandeered to back up his point(s). There are so many that no reasonable reader can keep track of them.

There are 12 chapters in the book plus an introduction and conclusion, but the number of examples is overwhelming; there is plainly not enough room to give each example the attention it deserves. I haven’t talked about Epstein’s discussion regarding eighteenth century female Venetian musicians, Nintendo’s shift into video games in the ‘80s, how students learn in classrooms, the inability of Russian peasants to grasp abstract reasoning, the story of Vincent Van Gogh (that anecdote was particularly tortured), a discussion about “superforecaster” Philip Tetlock, Copernicus and the nature of analogies, and on and on it goes.

One might say that isn’t a problem. After all, wouldn’t having a wealth of sources further support his argument? In theory yes, but not all sources are of equal weight or value. And so, what should be an advantage turned into a huge disadvantage for Epstein as each point didn’t have the space it needed to support his argument. Since Epstein is in favour of unusual analogies in the style of Copernicus, allow me to use one of my own to demonstrate his problem.

Consider Apollo 13. For those who don’t know the history, this Apollo mission went wrong, and the crew escaped disaster by the skin of their teeth. One of the many failures in the mission concerned the carbon dioxide filters. See, the spaceship had a limited oxygen supply for the crew and thus the crew needed a way of clearing out the poisonous carbon dioxide they exhaled. Usually, a filter cleared it away. However, the filter on Apollo 13 was damaged and they needed to fix it.

If the filter stayed broken, then every breath the crew drew in depleted the amount of breathable air on the ship. If too much carbon dioxide stayed in the cabin, the crew would run out of oxygen. In short, there was high drama trying to fix those filters so the crew of Apollo 13 would have enough air to get back home.

Returning to Epstein,, a chapter in his book is like one of those NASA’s spaceships. There is only so much oxygen available within a chapter, and each bit of evidence takes up more and more of that oxygen. Since Epstein CRAMS his book with so many different anecdotes and sources, none of them have enough room to breathe. That discussion about Nintendo took away from the point about having a “sampling period” and vice-versa. Neither is given the space needed for me, the reader, to fully benefit from the example. When you multiply all of the different anecdotes Epstein utilises and you can see how the book runs out of oxygen very quickly.

What The Book Needed

Part of the reason Epstein’s book is so popular now has to do with its (supposedly) irreconcilable difference with the the “10,000 hour/expert performance” school advocated by Anders Ericsson. Both Epstein and Ericsson have points as Tiger Woods and Roger Federer are both outstanding athletes who reached the top in opposite ways. So what gives?

Well, at the risk of overreaching myself, allow me to briefly say how I thought Epstein’s book would go. What I thought Epstein would do is indicate that the way to master those more difficult practice areas would be to utilise examples from other fields to prevent the omnipresent danger of plateauing. Additionally, I expected a pushback against practicing “specialisation techniques” in insular bubbles. For example, practicing golf is an insular practice. There are objective rules, but, as Epstein smartly mentioned, objective rules are far from universal in most careers.

In my experience, though I’m willing to be wrong about this, the people Epstein highlights as being talented in a wide-range of areas got there by mastering particular skills one at a time and then were exposed to a different range of ideas which started from the foundation of their one area of expertise. Roger Federer wasn’t starting as a completely blank slate when he began playing tennis. He was familiar with athletics, confident in his choice, and, once he committed to the sport, practiced with coaches and trainers of increasing talent and expertise, leading to a rich collaboration not to mention countless victories at Wimbledon. But the fact that Epstein’s book was so hazy that I, and many other readers, accidentally created a false dichotomy between the “Tiger Woods” approach and the “Roger Federer” approach indicates the weaknesses of the book.

Conclusion

The most common pushback against generalists is, rightly in my opinion, that they are too shallow and that they don’t invest enough into the rare and valuable skills the modern economy is so hungry for. Having more than one skill under your belt shouldn’t come at the cost of crucial gaps in topical understanding. Epstein’s book, by having so many examples without the needed space to fully explore them, has those crucial gaps in understanding. He may not be wrong arguing for range, but his knowledge felt seriously incomplete. If you read the book, you’ll walk away with a few prizes, but a coherent argument for range isn’t one of them.

True Parts Created A False Whole: Talking To Strangers

Malcolm Gladwell set the standard for non-fiction writers to emulate. No other writer existing in the non-fiction genre today has the ability to boil down ideas into a palatable narrative like Gladwell can. When reading a Malcolm Gladwell book, one feels like they are best friends with stone-cold experts on a subject. Events are given a Shakespearean stage direction. A graceful style and beautiful readability bless every page of Malcolm Gladwell’s books, which is why you feel like you were personally forsaken by God when it doesn’t work.

This is Talking To Strangers.

Talking To Strangers is Gladwell’s most recent book, published in 2019. It is his first book since 2013’s critically underwhelming David And Goliath. The latter book was my first Gladwell book and thus is one I have a special fondness for. I was quite surprised that critics weren’t all that wild about it. It wasn’t until the next book that I finally got what the critics were talking about.

So what changed between David and Goliath in 2013 and Talking To Strangers in 2019?

Two Digressions, One More Salient Than The Other

The first thing that happened between those two books was the election of Donald Trump as U.S. President. Thankfully, as I’m drafting this review, Trump was soundly defeated by Vice President Joe Biden in the 2020 General Election. But looking back on those years of Trump’s term, it really is surprising how many writers absolutely lost their minds, so to speak.

There was a tension, a disbelief and a daily moral outrage in the air. This is threatening to become a tangent, but the point still stands: Gladwell, like many other writers, underwent a change that I don’t think was good for him.

The second article of change afflicting Gladwell between 2013 and 2019 was his sheer and utter dominance in other media. Gladwell’s Revisionist History podcast exploded in popularity. I think, admittedly without much evidence, that around 2016 was the time that the Internet’s style of conversation reached a tipping point (pun completely intended).

There was too much information, and the ability to concentrate became evermore scarce. Thoughts were shallower and less clearly thought out. It should be no coincidence that Cal Newport’s Deep Work and Digital Minimalism came out in these years.

I have a pet theory that Gladwell’s brain, like the brains of countless other talented writers, reached an “attention saturation point” whereby a more thoughtful analysis became impossible. Flashy bullshit and more extreme content captured people’s attention in the years Gladwell spent writing Talking To Strangers.

I could completely wrong about all of that. Hell, it is somewhat ironic that I’m criticising Gladwell’s latest book for being too shallow by not going way down the theory rabbit hole myself. Regardless if I’m right or wrong, something changed between Gladwell’s two books that might make the reader take pause.

What Is In The Book?

Normally I like to perform an A/B comparison of what I liked and disliked in a book when reviewing it. However, the structure of Gladwell’s book renders that task utterly impossible. Talking To Strangers is structured like a detective story, theoretically anyway. It begins with Gladwell recounting the story of Sandra Bland, a young black woman who was pulled over by a white police officer in Texas. However, the traffic stop spiralled way out of control and Bland was arrested. She committed suicide in her jail cell three days later. Rather than do a deep dive into what made the two characters so isolated from each other, Gladwell instead yanks the reader away from the Texas roadside, promising that they will return there at the end of the book—after they explore the danger of dealing with strangers. The “detective story” was Gladwell examining other incidents between “strangers” to determine what went wrong in the Bland case.

To find out what went wrong, the reader is sent on a whirlwind Cliffnotes tour of the biggest scandals in the past 15-20 years, all of which Gladwell proclaimed were caused by “strangers” interacting with each other. Immediately, we have a problem not present in some of his other books.

Gladwell’s definition of “strangers” jumps around a lot. The characters and recounted events in this book vary hugely in scope. The Sandra Bland incident involved just two people. However, Gladwell also includes anecdotes from the Jerry Sandusky scandal at Penn State (involving way more than two people in the university), and the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme, a situation involving god knows how many people who were either participants in, or victims of, his fraud.

I was often startled by how thinly Gladwell spread his definition. Why would he do this? The objective answer is that Gladwell was trying to demonstrate what happens during “interactions” between “strangers” on a universal level. It didn’t matter if it was two people or two million people, the result was the same.

A Problem Of Scale

If you’re reading Talking To Strangers and you get a little bit uncomfortable with how dramatically overarching Gladwell’s narrative is, I wager that your concern has to do with the book’s scale. To clarify, I am referring to the book’s size in relation to the scale of the problem Gladwell is analysing. For example, Talking To Strangers is officially listed as having 400 pages. Those 400 pages are further subdivided into twelve chapters plus an introduction.

A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation will make the reader realise that a 400 page book containing (deep breath now) the Sandra Bland story (along with the Kansas City patrol experiment of the early ‘90s), the Sandusky scandal, the Brock Turner rape trial (and by extension a discussion about the effects of alcohol), Bernie Madoff’s fraud, the abuse scandal involving Larry Nasser, an examination of Chamberlain’s failed peace talks with Hitler, a discussion on Sylvia Plath’s suicide, the Ana Montes spy scandal, waterboarding, the Amanda Knox murder trial, and wrapping all of the above under the same causal bow of “truth-default theory” will have serious logistical problems.

In contrast, Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature is a book solely devoted to making the case that violence has declined in recent decades and centuries. That sounds like a broad subject, but Pinker’s effort is no less than 832 pages long plus an additional hundred or so pages for notes, data sources, and further readings.

Hampering Gladwell further was the string he used to tie everything all together, a psychological theory called the “default to truth”. Default to truth, the notion that in absence of any other evidence people will assume someone is telling the truth, may indeed be a string tying all of those anecdotes together. However, the mistake Gladwell makes is that he heavily implies truth-default theory is the only cause that could explain those incidents.

That was what didn’t sit right with me when I read Talking To Strangers. The huge range of topics in such a small book violated some kind of logical rule in my brain. It didn’t feel sufficiently plausible. I estimate that Gladwell burned through three or four books of good material by including the stories he did. Every one of the incidents he highlighted could have their own book devoted to them.

In fact, Gladwell hints at what could have been a great book with the Sandra Bland story. Another story featured in Talking To Strangers was an experiment in Kansas City that involved introducing heavy police patrols in one particularly crime-ridden district to great effect. Gladwell interviews the expert who introduced this idea to the Kansas City police chief. This story’s relation to the Sandra Bland incident ultimately came full circle at the end of the book, but given the breathlessness of the preceding chapters, I felt like I was reading Gladwell’s outline.

The Final Achilles Heel

Talking To Strangers should have worked for me, but given the serious issue of scale, it didn’t. However, it did get me thinking. Gladwell’s other books feature a similar style without much issue. He takes several anecdotes that people might be familiar with and then bolts them to unusual psychological papers or some other interesting concept. For Outliers, it happened to be Anders Ericsson’s research into expert performance. Yet that book also received some criticism for being too simplistic. Indeed, these were some of the same criticisms that so bewildered me when I read the reviews for David and Goliath.

Looking for something in common, I made this note about Gladwell’s books: The parts are true, but the whole is false.

To me, that is the ultimate weakness of every Malcolm Gladwell book, which some exhibit more than others. He takes a story that is true and pairs it alongside another true story which in turn is placed alongside a third true story and so on, but as a whole, the stories combined create a book that is false.

To be clear, Gladwell is not lying to you, deceiving anybody, or acting maliciously in any way.

Nevertheless Malcolm Gladwell’s unorthodox combination of different subjects puts him in serious danger of something called The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy. According to yourfallacyis.com, the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy involves “cherry-picking data clusters to suit an argument or finding a pattern to fit a presumption.” (For those wondering about the goofy name, it comes from the proverbial Texas cowboy who fires a gun at a barn and then proceeds to paint targets around the bullet holes to show what a good shot he is.) The pattern Gladwell found when examining the Sandra Bland case was one of “two strangers interacting” which in turn got applied to just about every third rail story under the sun.

A deep dive into the subjects of interactions between white police officers and black suspects/Chamberlain’s peace talks with Hitler might find they are related in several other ways. Additionally, such a deep dive might also reveal the patently obvious ways they are different. For example, Chamberlain and Hitler were both Europeans while the Bland incident involved Americans. The former was a diplomacy failure while the latter was a policing failure. One could analyse the differences to the point of being pedantic, but that doesn’t give Gladwell a get-out-of-reasoning-jail-free card.

Conclusion

Talking To Strangers features a wide-range of interesting topics in isolation. But when smushed together, none of it works.

The Doll House

Contemporary Fiction done right. 

This is a bit of a different (and smaller) review from what I normally do, but it is totally worth it.

Background

Normally this is where I'd give a speech about the history of a book. However, I can't really offer much as it's not a non-fiction. Instead, I'll tell you why I picked it up. 

For one thing, I've been irritated recently with contemporary fiction. This continues a long tradition with me where the rule of thumb is the older something is, the more I'll probably like it. Just ask my CD collection of the Beatles and Pink Floyd. 

But fiction is especially gravelling to my eyes these days. It all feels reactionary or narcissistic. The reason for the former is that whenever something does well (I.E J.D. Robb's ...in Death series and Harry Potter) the book industry floods itself with copycats trying to be the next big thing. In my opinion, that's a waste of time. Rather than find a female detective with a troubled past like Eve Dallas, have an amateur detective stay-at-home mum, that's different. 

As for the latter complaint of narcissism, this is me blaming social media for rubbing off on authors. The Internet's ability to distract people manages to astonish me every single day. It makes people think that the world is going to hell in a hand basket, giving rise to new contemporary thrillers among others. So these new 'thrillers' are all about terrorism and government conspiracies that can only be stopped by ONE MAN or psychological thrillers making the reader think that someone is looking for them.

Rom-Com female leads feel more narcissistic too (and thus unlikeable), there's a new dystopia and fantasy love on the rise, and the Literary Fiction genre feels like badly disguised poetry. 

In short, it drives me mad and I usually steer clear, so Phoebe's book is actually relieving. 

Why it stands out.

The Good, nay Great, part about this story is that it has a solid 'rhythm track'. For those not aware of the metaphor, bands in recording studios always record a 'rhythm track' of a song first without the vocals, guitar solos, or other flourishes added later in what's called an overdub session.

In the writing world, the rhythm track is the story and the overdubs are the flourishes like the fancy words and poetic phrasing.

Most psychological thrillers cock up the rhythm track spectacularly. This one doesn't and that's what made it stand out to me in a genre that I usually have zero patience for. 

Why is the story good and stable? Phoebe's characters all have this mysterious lunatic breathing them down and making them paranoid, and when the lunatic is revealed, they're not a paranormal monster but a mentally disturbed person. It's believable, it makes you scared if you're that kind of person, it does the job without making the reader feel stupid. 

Speaking of the characters, they are also very well done. It's a classic dysfunctional family. At the core of the story are the two sisters, Corrine and Ashley. Ashley is a mum of three with a husband who I thought was a loser and Corrine is struggling to conceive with her partner, Dominic. Both are mourning the loss of their recently deceased father. 

Again, this goes back to the solid rhythm track, but the character's intentions-and-obstacles are clear, making it real drama. Ashley wants a stable family and Corrine wants a child. Standing in their way is a total kook whose making them go crazy. 

That sounds really obvious and not much of a compliment, but it is MASSIVE praise for one reason: many novels screw this up. That sounds ridiculous, but many 'authors' don't understand that the stories are made up of a character wanting something and something somewhat formidable is standing in their way.

For crime novels, the detective wants to solve the mystery, and what's standing in the way is that the mystery is unsolved. In romance novels, the female protagonist usually wants a loving husband, but she's standing her own way. Etc. 

That intention-and-obstacle is the rhythm track of the story but often it is weak and covered up by pretty language. For instance, there's a book called The Mind-Body Problem that features great writing, but a weak story. It's little more than a character's thoughts. This goes back to the About Grace review down below on this blog. 

The simple fact that Phoebe's characters have an intention-and-obstacle make this a stronger debut than most. It doesn't sound like much, but a guy in the reading and writing business like me doesn't take this stuff for granted. 

And when I said that the story was contemporary, I don't think I stressed that word enough. All of this takes place in January 2017. Donald Trump was president... 

(Elliott will resume this review once the vomiting session has concluded.)

Where was I? Ah, one thing. 

One Note

Because this is not my field of normal reading, many times I asked 'Oh, I'm supposed to feel scared here?' That's only reason those sections didn't work for me. I have Aspergers, so my senses are a bit different from normal people. For all the neuro-typicals, it probably did its job very well, but I'm not the guy to ask. Judge for yourself. 

Conclusions. 

Phoebe's first book knocks it out of the park on basis of the solid, believable story containing characters with realistic intentions (getting pregnant and raising children shouldn't be hard) and threatening obstacles in their path (a total kook, mostly). Any complaints I have are trivial and should not affect your decision to buy it. 

So buy it. Five stars. 

About Grace

The first fiction post for the blog shall, naturally, be reviewing a debut novel. Today we're looking at Anthony Doerr's first full length novel, About Grace. 

Background

You might be familiar with this author, especially if you're a lover of literary fiction. Doerr's novel All The Light We Cannot See won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction and was critically acclaimed.

Given this, how does Doerr’s debut shape up?

Synopsis

Where do I even begin with the synopsis? Normally, I like to give readers a brief overview of the story. But I can’t do that without my opinion getting in the way. Instead, I'll provide you with the copy from the HarperCollins website (all credit goes to the appropriate individuals):

Growing up in Alaska, young David Winkler is crippled by his dreams. At nine, he dreams a man is decapitated by a passing truck on the path outside his family’s home. The next day, unable to prevent it, he witnesses an exact replay of his dream in real life. The premonitions keep coming, unstoppably. He sleepwalks during them, bringing catastrophe into his reach.

Then, as unstoppable as a vision, he falls in love, at the supermarket (exactly as he already dreamed) with Sandy. They flee south, landing in Ohio, where their daughter Grace is born. And then the visions of Grace’s death begin for Winkler, as their waterside home is inundated. Plagued by the same horrific images of Grace drowning, when the floods come, he cannot face his destiny and flees.

He beaches on a remote Caribbean island, where he works as a handyman, chipping away at his doubts and hopes, never knowing whether Grace survived the flood or met the doom he foretold. After two decades, he musters the strength to find out.

Okay…that’s an interesting description…maybe. I can safely say that I’ve never experienced a blurb like that before. What else does he have going for him?

The Good

Doerr's command of the English language is impeccable and frankly peerless. One of the true negative side effects of the Internet is the proliferation of terrible writing. Anybody can publish anything, and no the irony of my complaint is not lost on the guy who can publish anything on his blog. I might very well be one of those terrible writers, but my argument still stands: good writing is rare, and this fellow takes it up a notch. 

Take a look at this opening sentence.

He made his way through the concourse and stopped by a window to watch a man with two orange wands wave a jet into its gate. 

Images are immediately conjured; a complete mental movie is formed in your head. Many don't seem to realise that this is the primary goal of writing.

Without hesitation, Doerr’s writing plunges us into the story. And unlike the common advice that the writer needs to 'grab' the reader right away, this opening sentence isn't particularly grabbing. Rather, it is aesthetically pleasing. Words flow off this book’s page naturally and with ease. This is how storyteller commands his audience. 

You aren't grabbed, you are pulled, very gently I might add. Float down the river and experience the beauty of the jungle. 

But the jungle can get ugly fast. 

The Bad

With one weird-ass metaphor under my belt already and a synopsis I refused to comment on, we come to the negative aspects of this book.

What part of this book didn’t work for me?

Why, only the entire story.

Yeah, that's right. The entire story is ludicrous; the rock on which this beautiful text is built erodes dangerously fast. The excerpt blurb above masks the weirdness of the story well. But the fact is crystal clear: The protagonist, Winkler (a dumb name, but that's a minor comment) has dreams so vivid that at best they are graphic movies and at worst prophecies. And at no point do we learn why Winkler has these prophetic dreams. He just has them.

Now, it's not like Doerr is trying to convince you that everyone in this story can do it. Only Winkler can have these dreams. And Doerr doesn't gloss over the fact that other people can't do it. In fact, the whole shaky plot is built upon this dubious dreaming skill. For instance, Winkler dreams that his daughter will drown and starts to dangerously sleepwalk, terrifying Sandy (more on her in a minute). She thinks he's insane and tries to get him to go to a doctor. But no! Winkler refuses. Who shall believe such a thing? He bravely refuses like an idiot. Sandy, naturally, becomes convinced her new husband is insane and endangering their daughter. 

This is just one of many examples where Doerr commits the most elemental mistake a storyteller can make: you wind up disliking Winkler's actions and you subsequently don't want him to win. 

Not only can the protagonist act as a dreaming prophet that nobody understands, he acts on his dreams which can at times seem out of his control. So let's review the plot as best I understood it.

Winkler dreams about meeting Sandy in the supermarket-->Has an affair with her (yeah, she's married)-->Gets her pregnant-->Convinces her to flee with him to Cleveland, Ohio (WHY?!?!? I've lived in Cleveland and I can assure you that its not a great story setting)-->Has more prophetic dreams while he strings Sandy along-->Can't take it and flees to St. Vincent-->Works as an unskilled labourer for 25(!) years-->Wonders if his daughter is alive and sets out to find her-->Tries several Grace Winklers and comes to rest on a Grace Winkler (not his daughter) in Idaho-->Breaks into her house and flees while she calls the police-->Abandons his broken down car in the middle of nowhere-->Hikes and hitchhikes to Alaska-->Nearly freezes to death and is saved by Naahilyah (a young girl he watched grow up in St. Vincent who moved to Alaska)-->learns that Grace is alive and that Sandy's widower husband is also still alive complete with Winkler having a grandson-->Meets Grace and she hates him-->Ends the story in Alaska. 

Wow. And my sneering description doesn't cover the fact that Winkler has an unhealthy obsession with water. Many times throughout the book, the reader is treated to Winkler's specialty of studying snowflakes. And when the dreams strike, Winkler practically becomes insane. He sleepwalks, he stalks Naahilyah every day after dreaming she'd drown (and he does wind up saving her), he writes creepy letters to Sandy after fleeing to St. Vincent, and of course, when it comes to finding Grace, he becomes even more of a Don Quixote. I'm sure Doerr thought he was writing an epic romantic hero, but instead, Winkler is a delusional romantic.

In the course of trying to find Grace/Sandy, Winkler meets a bunch of strange characters, breaks into the house of a lookalike Grace and then flees because of his own misunderstanding. And of course, this semi-old man makes a string of bad decisions resulting in him nearly freezing to death in Alaska. Why do we want this guy to win? And bear in mind, he's doing this in the name of a daughter who was born out of wedlock with a married woman who didn't really like him anyway. 

Ironically, the character we're supposed to hate the most winds up being the most likeable. Sandy's husband Herman is described as a boring man who can't conceive a child with Sandy. When we finally meet Herman in person, he's understanding, forgiving, and compassionate both to Grace (who is already divorced with a child) and his grandson.

The final nail in the coffin for Winkler’s arc, such as it is, is Grace's reaction. Endings to books are critically important. You can't have the book be great and bungle the ending. In fact, there's an interesting story from a scientific study about this very fact. 

People who listened to a pleasant recording were suddenly forced to listen to a jarring scratching noise at the end of the piece. All of the participants said that they hated the piece of music afterwards even though they said they enjoyed it at the beginning. Books are no different. 

After Winkler getting a married woman pregnant, fleeing to Ohio with her, pretty much going crazy and spending twenty-five years obsessing about the daughter, Grace hates him (for good reason). It means that everything was a waste of time. Winkler threw away his life...all because of some ability to dream prophecies he never really understands. 

Summary

Doerr is a master writer, but not a master storyteller. It's strange because this book runs in opposition to most people’s complaints about books. People usually complain that though they like the story and the characters, the writing style is annoying. Commercial fiction in general has this problem. The cascade of absurd romance novels, dumb detective stories, and ludicrous sci-fi trace most of their problems back to the fluffy writing underpinning the plot. 

Literary fiction has the opposite problem. The writing is fantastic, but the plot is so wafer thin that you're distracted by the shiny use of careful adjectives. 

Doerr's next novel, All The Light We Cannot See, marries beautiful language with a good story to good effect.  This book on the other hand…was an experience.