Non-Fiction book assessment checklist
Most non-fiction books are not useful. Some of them are OK. A rare few are good. A rarer few are like diamonds in the mud - those make reading non-fiction worth it.
Unless there is shortage of literature on a topic, it makes no sense to settle for anything less than great in an era of information overload. Even skimming through a book takes away time.
The problem is, many times the quality of a non-fiction book is not obvious. Finding a good book in Business/Science/Self-Help section (after you’re done pointing and laughing at Robert Greene books and the like), or deciding to invest time in a suggested book - it is an acquired intuition.
The following is my sort-of-a-checklist to aid that decision-making. Writing this down helps me refer to it and (hopefully) exercise conscious judgement, instead of getting swayed by gut feeling, environment, or just the mood of the day.
- Try to suppress any intrigue induced by the title alone. Most of the presentation layer for a book is not decided by authors, but by marketing departments at the publishing company. This affects both ways - there are good books with bad titles, and bad books with titles that sound promising.
- Read the back cover, but with scepticism hat still on. Back cover doesn’t tell you what the book is about, it tells you what the book wants you to think about itself. Read between the boasts.
- Accept that more often than not, you will be disappointed. Don’t fall for the sunk cost fallacy.
- Read the Table of Contents: Often this helps you scope the book, what it covers and what it doesn’t - you might find you had formed the wrong idea about the scope.
- For books that rely on research, check the quantity and quality of citations. This is where most pop-sci books get rejected for me. Replication crisis1 rendered so many books groundless and I wish there was an easy way to do this (e.g. a website which accepts a paper and assigns a citation quality score).
- An exception to above would be for books that are doing opinionated theorising, which are good sometimes - only sometimes. You need to already trust the author(s).
- Spot-check the Index: The book may intersect with your area of expertise, and reviewing that area can help you triangulate the quality. E.g. A Cognitive Linguist may cover a Computer Science topic, and I can assess the quality of the coverage. An expert in one field is not necessarily an expert in another.
- Open the book to a random chapter, read a page or two, get a feel of it.
- Read the conclusion parts of a selected chapter.
- If there’s time, read the Preface. An increasingly futile exercise unfortunately, since lately these are sounding more and more like they are written directly by salespeople. On the flip side, I have seen many books that give ‘marketing vibes’ but are actually good (e.g. “Getting Things Done” by David Allen).
- Seek opinions about the book and the author on non-too-enshittified23 internet spaces (e.g. StackExchange, niche Fediverse communities, HN)
- Estimate Information density. Some books would look too thin indeed if they removed the publisher-mandated-anecdote-padding. If the topic is valuable enough, I will skip over ‘stories’ while skimming the book.
If you’re in a library, or a bookstore, you likely won’t have much time for a book anywhere beyond this, so this is where you make a decision.
These tests are not perfect, but they don’t need to be. I’m only deciding to start reading a book, and I can always abandon it if it hasn’t delivered around 1/3rd of the way through.
Footnotes/Links 🔗
- How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler