When the book was good, It was very good indeed, But when it was bad it was horrid.

I am with Pliny the Elder who, according to Pliny the Younger, often said,

Nullum esse librum tam malum ut non aliqua parte prodesset

No book is so bad as to not have something of use in some part of it. 

I buy books in volume and read them voraciously.  It is not uncommon at all for me to set a partially read book aside for any of a number of reasons.  I think I will enjoy the author more, later, I will think more of the topic later, I enjoy the material only in small doses, I think the topic will be of greater relevance and interest later, etc.  I have a lot of postponed books, many of which are completed months, years, even decades later.  I have had no regard for the work of Emily Dickinson for decades.  I now find myself beginning to enjoy some of her poems.  Fortunately, I have a couple of anthologies of her work which I set aside long ago and which now have come back out of the darkness into the reading light.  

What is relatively rare is for me to deliberately choose to no longer continue reading a book.  However, in the three weeks I have encountered four such books.  Spoiler alerts throughout.

Dog Company by Lynn Vincent and Captain Roger Hill

The Good Soldier by David Finkel 

An Economist Walks Into a Brothel And Other Unexpected Places to Understand Risk by Allison Schrager

Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data and What the Internet Can Really Tell Us About Who We Really Are by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

All four involve topics in which I have a strong interest and a reasonable amount of knowledge.  

Dog Company I discarded because it is badly overwritten and has an argument it wants to make without being explicit about the argument.  From the start, the over-writing is simply blatant.  You don't get a catch in the throat when delivering a eulogy.  Your throat is clutched by a memory when delivering a eulogy.  That sort of thing.  Very emotional language.  

I was a hundred pages in before I comprehended what was happening.  The Captain loses two soldiers to a roadside bomb in Afghanistan.  He becomes convinced that local civilian contractors on his base are passing information to terrorists who then use that information to ambush his men.  He begins to arrest them.  Senior command is unwilling to do anything about the spies when the Captain arrests them and requires the Captain to release them after four days.  The Captain extorts confessions from a couple of the arrested spies by beating up one of them and then misleading the others into believing that he is executing some of them.

By about page 100, we switch from the scene of events in Afghanistan to the US where the Captain faces a court martial.  

Despite the blatant advocacy attired in over-dramatic language, there is a core of an interesting story that could have been better presented.  Under combat circumstances, how do you go about properly vetting local contractors?  How do you monitor them?  How do you prove they are spying?  How do you convict?  What do you do with them so that they can no longer pose a danger?  What do you do if the command structure is deliberately turning a blind eye to spies and the American deaths arising from Afghan spying activities?  

Excellent and compelling questions.  Just lost under the writing and the advocacy.

The Good Soldier suffers from authorial disdain.  I abandoned at about page 70 so maybe the tone changes.  The author follows a Company Captain into Iraq and chronicles the challenges and failures of their tour.  Very quickly it is apparent that the author does not approve of the Iraq war.  But you can't help but also feel like he does not respect either the Captain or the men under his command.  

Again, interesting issues.  How do you prepare battlefield leaders and troops for unfamiliar battle circumstances?  How do you protect them from novel weapons?  How do you prepare an American force to create and police the peace in the midst of a civil war?  Great and challenging questions.  But the authors is not interested in addressing those questions and seems to have a low regard for America, for the Iraq war and for the American combatants.  He does not make an argument that they are wrong or bad.  He just assumes they are and that you will share the view.  Perhaps I misunderstood him.  But it doesn't seem like it.

An Economist Walks Into a Brothel felt like the publisher was seeking a Freakonomics hit.  But that's not what they got.  Turgid and confused text with a forced jocular tone.  Schrager lost me on the second chapter where her discussion of the concept of a risk-free option was confusing.  I am familiar with concept and am not confused by the concept.  It was her inability to convey the concept which was confusing.  

With Everybody Lies I got to page 181 before I finally pulled the ripcord.  Stephens-Davidowitz is a data wunderkind among the clerisy and the forward is by the very admirable Steven Pinker.  But, oh my.  

S-D is exploring how newly available information arising from the mass digitization of information and social interactions post-2000 reveals information which was not legible before.  

The problem is that S-D has a range of hard beliefs and biases which color his interpretation of the data.  That, and the fact that, as my mother-in-law used to say, "he hasn't lived long enough."  He has hard opinions about things which someone with more life experience or knowledge would allow are clearly more complex than S-D acknowledges.

As one example, he arrives at the conclusion that systemic bias against women is alive and well because parents google "Is my son a genius?" far more often than they do "Is my daughter a genius?"  The fact that there is a discrepancy is interesting in its own right.  But S-D simply leaps to the conclusion that parents are more convinced of their sons' potential and that they are biased against their own daughters.

Is there another explanation which might cover the facts without assuming into existence a misogynistic bias against daughters?  Well, sure.  Several.  To me, the most obvious explanation is if the male variance hypothesis is true.  There is a good amount of evidence supporting the hypothesis and there is a fair amount of opposition to it as well.  

One aspect of the male variance hypothesis is the evidence that men and women have the same average IQ but that men have a larger standard deviation than women.  There are more male geniuses and more male dullards than there are with women.  So if the hypothesis is correct, then parents would have good reason for thinking they are seeing more indicators of genius among their sons than they are with their daughters.

S-D never entertains this idea.  Or any other plausible explanation.  He is having a fun time examining newly available data and reaching conclusions he already believes.  Which is too bad.  The data is new and it likely can and will tell us new things and likely will allow us to quantify revealed preferences which were impossible to quantify in the past.  

But Seth Stephens-Davidowitz is not the field guide to reliably lead us on this journey.  

The disappointment of four abandoned books in the space of three weeks is real.  But it is like flipping coins.  Flipping four tails in a row is unusual but it happens.  Just one of those things.

It is interesting to see a common signal among the four which I would not have noticed had they been weeks and months apart.

When I read a book with a new fact, an interesting interpretation, an unfamiliar argument, an artful expression, I make a very small fold at the top of the page.  When I have a lot of folded pages, it is almost always a sign of an excellent book.  When I have finished the book, I will go back and check the material on the folded pages and validate or otherwise.  I will capture some of the material in Thingfinder.  I like discovering new facts.  I enjoy it when someone points out an alternative viable explanations, it is refreshing to investigate the details of a novel argument, and artful expression is just a pleasure.  

In all four of these abandoned books, there were a lot of marked pages but with a distinctly different pattern.  A lot more checking of facts known or believed to be wrong.  A lot more implausible arguments that need to be validated one way or another.  A lot more questionable interpretations.  And very few artful expressions.

In each of those folded page instances, I am going back and spending time affirming or denying the author's work.  That takes a lot of time.  Especially when the author is frequently wrong.  Pliny is correct, bad books can have good parts.  Just as a bad meal can have good parts.  But if the ratio of bad to good exceeds some critical point, it just isn't worth investing more time looking for the good parts.

As I say, a mere statistical fluke.

Counterbalanced by an unexpected winner.  

I picked up The Cold War, A New History by John Lewis Gaddis sometime in the past few years.  

I grew up in the last half of The Cold War living on its front lines (England, Sweden, Venezuela, Libya.)  I knew a good number of people directly affected by the Cold War and or who were refugees/emigrants from behind the Iron Curtain.  

My experiences of histories of the Cold War have been that a lot of them are dry, and/or overly political, and/or overly ideological, and/or written in academic jargon.  So while I am interested in the topic, I did not have high expectations.

I was delightfully wrong.  There are copious page folds of the good kind.  I want to read it through to the end in order to respect the author's argument.  On the other hand, I want to take time out and research some of the issues raised.  I am only 15% of the way into it but am anticipating an excellent read all the way through and eventually excerpts into ThingFinder.  

That's just the nature of reading.  Win some, lose some.  But The Cold War sure looks like a rewarding winner.  

To brutally rewrite Wordsworth:

There was a little book

There was a little book,

            Which had little folds,

Perched right at the top of the pages.

            When the book was good,

            It was very good indeed,

But when it was bad it was horrid.