French novels quite often have just the first paragraph of the book on the (back) cover, I think that works rather well (and I have bought books by unknown authors on the strength of that).
That might indicate if you like the prose, but that only really works if the author makes 100% sure to indicate what's the genre and theme of the novel already on the first paragraph?
I do get the impression that French writers take particular care on the first paragraph (for just that reason I guess), while they will often "just end", like a sudden "fin" 90 minutes into a 60s New Wave film ...
The article makes the point that I also agree with, most people buy books because someone loved it and told them about it with passion.
And then a small number of "book people" actively seek out books like it is an adventure, and then filter the winners out to friends, family, community, and net...
2 things (in the corporate world): Android and Spring framework. It's also basically OOP the language which means large enterprises are biased towards it.
Other factors are that it has very strong built-in libraries and has become a popular choice for "how to program" classes so lots of people are familiar with it. Having a similar name to JavaScript (the web's native language) also helps.
These are reasons for why an individual hacker might not take to a language. They don't factor in to a large organisation's choice of language. And to be honest, quite a few of these arguments would apply to Javascript as well.
Meh. Many of the greatest works open by explaining themselves in miniature (to the extent that it's probably a named literary technique). If you let your engagement with a work be circumscribed by what you're told about it beforehand, that seems more like a you problem.
I also would argue that if something is right in the blurb on the cover, it is not a spoiler in any meaningful sense. People have gotten so obsessed with avoiding spoilers these days, to a truly crazy extent. It's one thing to want to be surprised, but people get so neurotic about not wanting to know anything whatsoever.
That highly depends on the story. There are some stories which rely on surprising the reader in a delightful way. If that's revealed in the description it'll take away something really important. I've seen that many times. It makes reading the part up to then look very different, and more boring.
In fact I don't like to read anything where it's clear where it's going, it doesn't have to be because it's revealed in the blurb, it can as well be because of the author's writing.
In contrast, for non-fiction a good summary is perfectly fine.
Same. It's also quite a different experience reading a book without having any idea what it is about. Mostly Sci-Fi and Fantasy in my case.
These days I ask my partner to check for other books in a series. Even just trying to look up the sequels online can spoil quite a lot. This may sound like a hassle but it's actually not.
Agreed. I'd say the excerpts on the back of DVDs are actually worse than books. Have been burned by those a few times. Not that DVDs are that common anymore.
I’ve also seen this with the two sentence blurb about TV series episodes on streaming and broadcasting services.
Eg, I was really pissed off seeing Sky TV spoil Game of Thrones like this. I browsing TV schedule one night to see was on, and accidentally saw a GoT episode summary scroll by : “After the death of XXXXX, the characters try to…”
A lot of translated titles contain slight spoilers though, for example "predestination" becomes "time paradox" in Korean, it immediately gives you a hint of some part of the twist.
I've seen streaming services spoil an episode with just the thumbnail. I can't remember what show's twist was ruined for me, but I'm pretty sure it was Netflix.
Netflix also has a really annoying habit of re-ordering seasons. For some bizarre reason shows like bake off are listed with the most recently added series first. For some shows that might not be a huge problem but in the first episode of one series they actually recap the winners of all previous series, spoiling several years of programing for unwary netflix viewers.
At least one extremely typical problem on Netflix and basically every other streaming service is that the episode thumbnails (which I usually have to go take a look at just to find out how many episodes there are) will ruin any cliffhangers. If a character's survival seems uncertain, the uncertainty will be lessened quite a bit by seeing their face in the thumbnail of a subsequent episode.
Maybe it marks me semi-literate, but I've always liked the cover art. I know that it's absolutely unconnected to the work itself, but it shows an effort on the part of the publisher that lately has been sadly lacking, and they're pretty incentivized to hint at the nature of the story in a way that matters to me. They are seeking readers for that kind of fiction, after all.
Cover art is not unconnected to the work itself. It correlates fairly strongly with the stylistic choices made in a book, though that correlation becomes more tenuous the more distance you add between the author and the selection of cover art, be it middlemen in the form of a publisher and a separate cover artist or just the passage of time motivating new cover art matching the predominant contemporary aesthetic while the contents of the book remain unchanged. This correlation is the result of at least two factors: 1) that people who have specialized into a very specific niche have shared stylistic preferences that motivated them to specialize into the niche in the first place, resulting in a clustering of aesthetic preferences between niches, and 2) that even when middlemen are involved, those middlemen will try to align the aesthetics of cover art such that they align with the spirit of the book.
It is a very natural corollary of not judging a book by its cover. Judgment is almost impossible to avoid, so you should naturally not expose yourself to it.
since a self-published author has to write the blurb himself (of course, you usually wouldn't even have a dust jacket, unless you went to the expense of a hardcover), I'm curious:
What would you want to see on the jacket?
The first paragraph? That puts an unfairly high burden on the first paragraph, IMHO. If a friend is telling you about the book, they're almost always going to say more than would fit in those few paragraphs.
The best sci-fi and fantasy ones for me have focused on describing the setting and then a very broad summary of the first few chapters. Typically little-to-nothing about the overall plot (just what would happen in those chapters), let alone the middle or ending.
I briefly chatted with Chris Hitchens a few times, and during one of them, he extolled the virtues of never, ever reading a book jacket, or foreward before reading the source material.
It's so incredibly hard to find some older texts without some modernist forward lecturing us about a previous age. Just give me the text I'll make up my own mind.
Some years ago, I gave a family member the NYRB printing of Butcher's Crossing by John Williams. The thank you note said that he had loved the book, but hated the introduction. I told him that I had been vaguely aware that book had an introduction, but hadn't read it and still might not. Generally, I don't read introductions, unless they are by the author.
When I was in middle school I found my mom’s 1984 edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four. The back cover had some phrase like “engrossing from the first sentence to the last 4 words.”
If the cover had just said “engrossing from beginning to end” it wouldn’t have tempted me, but specifically saying “4 words” made it irresistible!
I think I made it through half of the book before I broke down and skipped to the end. It’s undoubtedly a spoiler, but certainly not an unexpected twist.
I still finished the book and was indeed engrossed by the concepts for a few years.
I went through a phase in high school where I'd read the last sentence of a book first, and then begin it. It was actually pretty fun because it usually doesn't spoil very much. I stopped because once I did end up spoiling something major. Don't remember what though.
I think reviews can be really useful when they're at the extreme of either end of the scale. Books with a positive blurb from an author I like can sway me, even though I'm sure they're paid for that and don't always read what they recommend.
I use reviews all the time for movies. I also don't put much faith in individual critics, but when the overall consensus of critics and internet randos suggests that a movie is terrible, it's probably terrible.
Negative movie reviews are more helpful than positive ones. A bad film might get overwhelmingly good reviews because it's got some political value or is considered "important".
Reviews for kid's movies are generally pretty honest when they're terrible, but some reviewers will inflate the scores based on how much they think it will appeal to kids so the middle ground in that genre is risky.
Good horror and sci-fi movies routinely get bad reviews from people who are just put off by the genre, so when horror or sci-fi films get wide acclaim they're probably worth checking out (although again, politics can throw this off).
> Books with a positive blurb from an author I like can sway me, even though I'm sure they're paid for that
FYI at least in fiction books, the author is rarely if ever paid to blurb a book. They're just offered an advanced copy or ebook and like it, they'll send a blurb back to the publisher.
I use reviews because life is too short. There will be more books I don't read than books I do. However, I've found that a mere recommendation from a geek is enough to find good science fiction. I don't have to read long or professional reviews. For films I have to use reviews, though. What the general public recommend tends to be completely crap for some reason.
Agreed. That goes for a lot of things. Around here there's a huge film festival once a year, thousands of visitors plus the town's population will fill the streets and watch movies all day and late night. What I've found is that it's pointless to read the daily updates by critics in the newspapers. It's like they're nearly always completely disconnected from what's actually good, for most people. As I'll have to shotgun-shop tickets during the festival week it's a good idea to have some indication of what I'll choose - as these are almost always totally unknown movies (and in general no Hollywood movies).
What works, for me and many others, is to simply listen to what people are telling each other while hanging around in a cafe or walking in the streets. Then pick movies from that. If they recommend a movie, get a ticket. I've watched astounding movies that way. In contrast, the critics.. meh. Most of the time.
One more thing about critics.. occasionally there's a little introduction by someone before the movie starts. If that person happens to be a critic then there's only one thing to do: Plug your ears and sing "nananana" to yourself until he or she is done. EVERY critic seems to have this extreme urge to reveal crucial parts of the plot. Only the critics do this, other people don't.
This is a little bit more true in the world of online reviews by random strangers. But if you find a reviewer that you “know well” they can be a godsend. You know their quirks, you know what you liked and they didn’t, etc. then a new review is full of this extra information. Their review isn’t a yes/no recommendation, it is parallax you can use to better understand if you will like it or not.
The trick is finding the reviewer who has the same taste as you.
I used to have one in the local paper, he could rate movies as a representative of their genre, instead of comparing the latest Marvel AAA CGI fest to Fellini and being disappointed because the Marvel one wasn't as deep.
Now I've got a few reviewers on Youtube I "trust" and have seen some less known movies based on their positive non-spoiler reviews.
I usually read books recommended by other people, articles, goodreads, bookclub, etc.
However, when I'm browsing in the library I always go by jacket art and blurb, then read a few random passages. How else to sift through dozens of books to find the one I want to invest my time in?
I have two questions for the author of this essay:
1) Does this apply equally to non-fiction (the essay seems to be about primarily about novels)
2) Does she finish most books or does she quickly abandon the ones that don’t click?
My biggest problem is that there are far too many books to read and I’ll take almost anything that helps me winnow the list. So yeah, knowing what it’s about helps.
When I was a child, I voraciously reread all of my favorite books over and over, and I loved the book jackets because – well, they were an extra few words from my favorite books to enjoy!
After making a good cover, picking your eight key search words and writing a good catchy summary is probably the hardest part of the authoring process. I have had about ten goes now for my book but none have managed to generate more than a couple of clicks. It is a lot harder than it first seems and the search algorithms for new authors are not your friend.
I have written and edited jacket copy. Part of the fun is that it is derived from catalog copy, and may not have been written with the manuscript in hand. the most fun is making a terrible book seem not so terrible. And when you’re doing it freelance, you have to do it fast, because the pay is a pittance.
I don't mind if the text describes something I will read anyway in the first charpter or two... Like "Hercule Holmes and his sidekick Barnaby Watson go to africa for a vacation and find a dead body on the bus! Which of the passangers could be the murderer?" and then, after that, the mystery begins.
What i really really hate is "a book with a plot twist in the end that'll make you reread the whole book again!" ... why do I need to know that there will be a plot twist? Now i'll expect it, and know that the 'obvious' murdeder isn't the one guilty of murder, but some twist will change everything.
Same for the movies... where the trailer has enough spoilers to see how the movie ends and who the murderer is.... it sucks... and it's not even a columbo-like movie, where you see the murder in the first scene, both you and Columbo know who the murderer is 2 minutes in, and you just wait to see how he "gets him"...
>What i really really hate is "a book with a plot twist in the end that'll make you reread the whole book again!" ... why do I need to know that there will be a plot twist?
obviously book jackets exist for marketing purposes, I'm supposing there is a market of people who like to know that there will be a tricky plot twist so they can see if they can guess.
Some people get _so_ into a movie that they literally memorise every trailer. Then they actively try to find the scenes from the trailer while watching the movie.
And if those don't match, they'll shout at the Internet.
Case in point: Rogue One had shots in the trailer that never made it to the final movie (charging through the beaches and the Tie-fighter rising to meet Jyn in the tower). People went berserk.
But I 100% agree with you, they should shoot the trailer scenes separately and not have any of them actually in the movie just to keep it interesting.
I don't watch movie trailers anymore, maybe it's nostalgia but nowadays they are absolutely awful and full of spoilers, as if spoilers were a feature and not a bug. I guess it has something to do with how the movies themselves are put together. The use of stupid plot mechanisms such as "multiple dimensions" to be able to kill a character and then revive them again, or use multiple disposable versions of the same character for a few minutes at a time, etc. I guess if you don't care about such blatant cheating in the movie itself you won't mind a bad trailer.
That said, my approach nowadays is to consider watching a movie as a kind of risk-taking. I watch the movie without knowing or expecting anything; sometimes it will be worth it, sometimes it won't, but when it is, then DAMN is it worth it! On the other hand, if I watch the trailer then I know for sure that it will not happen. So... I take the risk.
I have discovered and enjoyed so many books by reading the book jackets, which I would not have, if I only followed recommendations. I feel like doing this actually lets me make my own judgements about a book instead of restricting myself to lists or recommendations of "good" books.
I completely agree, and I'm glad someone wrote so eloquently about this.
I listen to a lot of audiobooks (often for book clubs), i.e. which don't require handling a physically printed cover, and I've really enjoyed the experience of figuring out "what is this book about, and who even are the main characters??", that would have been completely robbed by even a quick perusal of the book jacket.
Oh, you want to know what I'm reading now? Everything by Irvin Yalom. Lying on the Couch is a good place to start.
This has been my approach to most media. I don't watch movie trailers. I just trust recommendations and go in blind.
With books I'll only get the roughest idea of what they're about and start reading. This has worked really well for fiction, but not so well with non-fiction. There is a lot of really tedious non-fiction out there.
I'm currently enjoying The Overstory. In the non-fiction category I'll recommend anything by Bill Bryson.
> In the non-fiction category I'll recommend anything by Bill Bryson.
Please no. Bryson’s The Mother Tongue is one of the worst pop-sci books on linguistics ever published, with a factual error or urban myth on nearly every page. Because, after all, Bryson is a journalist and a humorist and not any actual expert in that field. As entertaining as some of his other books may be, I suspect that he plays fast and loose with facts there as well.
Tangential - I used to go to a film club where they would show you a movie and you would have no idea at all what it was going to be. That added a lot to the experience.
133 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 195 ms ] threadAnd then a small number of "book people" actively seek out books like it is an adventure, and then filter the winners out to friends, family, community, and net...
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Text_fragments
Other factors are that it has very strong built-in libraries and has become a popular choice for "how to program" classes so lots of people are familiar with it. Having a similar name to JavaScript (the web's native language) also helps.
In contrast, for non-fiction a good summary is perfectly fine.
I never read them anymore. It's harder to find books, but at least I don't see literal spoilers.
These days I ask my partner to check for other books in a series. Even just trying to look up the sequels online can spoil quite a lot. This may sound like a hassle but it's actually not.
Eg, I was really pissed off seeing Sky TV spoil Game of Thrones like this. I browsing TV schedule one night to see was on, and accidentally saw a GoT episode summary scroll by : “After the death of XXXXX, the characters try to…”
Otherwise there's somebody working there that is a monster.
Dee: "No that's a bad idea. Usually when you get involved somebody gets hurt."
Frank: "That's ridiculous. I'm just paling around with the guys. How is anybody going to get hurt?"
Title Card: "Frank Sets Sweet Dee on Fire"
Netflix also has a really annoying habit of re-ordering seasons. For some bizarre reason shows like bake off are listed with the most recently added series first. For some shows that might not be a huge problem but in the first episode of one series they actually recap the winners of all previous series, spoiling several years of programing for unwary netflix viewers.
Shows some great cover art
What would you want to see on the jacket?
The first paragraph? That puts an unfairly high burden on the first paragraph, IMHO. If a friend is telling you about the book, they're almost always going to say more than would fit in those few paragraphs.
If the cover had just said “engrossing from beginning to end” it wouldn’t have tempted me, but specifically saying “4 words” made it irresistible!
I think I made it through half of the book before I broke down and skipped to the end. It’s undoubtedly a spoiler, but certainly not an unexpected twist.
I still finished the book and was indeed engrossed by the concepts for a few years.
The idea that the opinion of some critic at a big newspaper has anymore weight or merit than anyone elses opinion makes no sense at all.
I use reviews all the time for movies. I also don't put much faith in individual critics, but when the overall consensus of critics and internet randos suggests that a movie is terrible, it's probably terrible.
Negative movie reviews are more helpful than positive ones. A bad film might get overwhelmingly good reviews because it's got some political value or is considered "important".
Reviews for kid's movies are generally pretty honest when they're terrible, but some reviewers will inflate the scores based on how much they think it will appeal to kids so the middle ground in that genre is risky.
Good horror and sci-fi movies routinely get bad reviews from people who are just put off by the genre, so when horror or sci-fi films get wide acclaim they're probably worth checking out (although again, politics can throw this off).
FYI at least in fiction books, the author is rarely if ever paid to blurb a book. They're just offered an advanced copy or ebook and like it, they'll send a blurb back to the publisher.
What works, for me and many others, is to simply listen to what people are telling each other while hanging around in a cafe or walking in the streets. Then pick movies from that. If they recommend a movie, get a ticket. I've watched astounding movies that way. In contrast, the critics.. meh. Most of the time.
One more thing about critics.. occasionally there's a little introduction by someone before the movie starts. If that person happens to be a critic then there's only one thing to do: Plug your ears and sing "nananana" to yourself until he or she is done. EVERY critic seems to have this extreme urge to reveal crucial parts of the plot. Only the critics do this, other people don't.
I used to have one in the local paper, he could rate movies as a representative of their genre, instead of comparing the latest Marvel AAA CGI fest to Fellini and being disappointed because the Marvel one wasn't as deep.
Now I've got a few reviewers on Youtube I "trust" and have seen some less known movies based on their positive non-spoiler reviews.
However, when I'm browsing in the library I always go by jacket art and blurb, then read a few random passages. How else to sift through dozens of books to find the one I want to invest my time in?
They always have amazing suggestions based on what you like. They're like machines!
Source: my best friend is a librarian. So it might just be him.
My biggest problem is that there are far too many books to read and I’ll take almost anything that helps me winnow the list. So yeah, knowing what it’s about helps.
https://d28hgpri8am2if.cloudfront.net/book_images/onix/cvr97...
What i really really hate is "a book with a plot twist in the end that'll make you reread the whole book again!" ... why do I need to know that there will be a plot twist? Now i'll expect it, and know that the 'obvious' murdeder isn't the one guilty of murder, but some twist will change everything.
Same for the movies... where the trailer has enough spoilers to see how the movie ends and who the murderer is.... it sucks... and it's not even a columbo-like movie, where you see the murder in the first scene, both you and Columbo know who the murderer is 2 minutes in, and you just wait to see how he "gets him"...
obviously book jackets exist for marketing purposes, I'm supposing there is a market of people who like to know that there will be a tricky plot twist so they can see if they can guess.
Some people get _so_ into a movie that they literally memorise every trailer. Then they actively try to find the scenes from the trailer while watching the movie.
And if those don't match, they'll shout at the Internet.
Case in point: Rogue One had shots in the trailer that never made it to the final movie (charging through the beaches and the Tie-fighter rising to meet Jyn in the tower). People went berserk.
But I 100% agree with you, they should shoot the trailer scenes separately and not have any of them actually in the movie just to keep it interesting.
That said, my approach nowadays is to consider watching a movie as a kind of risk-taking. I watch the movie without knowing or expecting anything; sometimes it will be worth it, sometimes it won't, but when it is, then DAMN is it worth it! On the other hand, if I watch the trailer then I know for sure that it will not happen. So... I take the risk.
I listen to a lot of audiobooks (often for book clubs), i.e. which don't require handling a physically printed cover, and I've really enjoyed the experience of figuring out "what is this book about, and who even are the main characters??", that would have been completely robbed by even a quick perusal of the book jacket.
Oh, you want to know what I'm reading now? Everything by Irvin Yalom. Lying on the Couch is a good place to start.
With books I'll only get the roughest idea of what they're about and start reading. This has worked really well for fiction, but not so well with non-fiction. There is a lot of really tedious non-fiction out there.
I'm currently enjoying The Overstory. In the non-fiction category I'll recommend anything by Bill Bryson.
Please no. Bryson’s The Mother Tongue is one of the worst pop-sci books on linguistics ever published, with a factual error or urban myth on nearly every page. Because, after all, Bryson is a journalist and a humorist and not any actual expert in that field. As entertaining as some of his other books may be, I suspect that he plays fast and loose with facts there as well.