Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacobwilliamroy | Hacker News Reader

As a person who reads a lot of books (1 book every 1-3 weeks depending on its length) I can say most of them are crap garbage and I throw them in the garbage when I'm finished with them. A lot of murder mysteries. I don't know why so many authors write murder mysteries. It's so hard to make a mystery compelling in a book format, because I know no matter how opaque or confusing things are in the beginning, if I just keep reading eventually everything will be explained. Even if the explanation doesn't make sense, there will be an explanation, eventually.

Maybe I should just stop reading random books. Follow Oprah's book club or the commandant's reading list or something like that.

View on HN

Well that seems like a waste. Why not give them to your local second-hand shop, put them up to pick up for free on your local small ads website, donate them to a library, give away to friend, or anything besides throwing them in the garbage?!

If you wanted to read it, surely someone else wants to as well. Then they can see for themselves that it's crap, without needing to have a new book produced for that.

> Maybe I should just stop reading random books

Sounds like a good idea if the trash can is your star rating for a significant fraction of them

I understand there is a market for these books. There has to be for someone to bother writing hundreds of pages and then for someone else to invest in editing and publishing and making cover art. That's why I'm not naming specific names, because I know there are a lot of people involved in making these things and I'm genuinely happy for them. I already buy these books from goodwill but I guess I should just give them back on the off chance that this stuff actually connects with someone.

Avid mystery (and romance) readers just burn through books. A lot of them aren't that great, but they're designed to pass the time, not stand out as works of art. So that's why there are so many of them, and why they're often kind of crap. Like sitcoms, or TV police procedurals. The standards aren't that high because people just want something that's pretty okay in a familiar style.

Of course there are writers who write in any genre and produce really great stuff, but you're not likely to find them by picking books at random from Goodwill, by Sturgeon's law (90% of everything is crap) alone.

I mean, if you don't like murder mysteries, no-one's forcing you to keep reading them.

I don't hate all murder mysteries. It's more specifically books with really bad pacing, boring characters driving boring plots. That can happen in any book really. And those kinds of things don't really come out until I get past the first few chapters and at that point I just want to see how awful things can get before the end. A book can still be entertaining even if I don't like it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com