> why on earth would I continue reading in the hopes that somehow this book will become magically brilliant, brilliant enough to make up for that paragraph and be the winner of this major award? I have 100 other books to get to. I am not a fast reader.
Because that's literally your literaly job?
Think about judging a 3 course meal. If the appetizer is bad, what is the chance that you will rate this meal as the best even if the main course and dessert were very good? If you are eating at restaurants that are supposedly great, the chance is tiny.
That's literally the opposite of what happens, you can't judge the whole thing if you've only read 1 paragraph!
> If the first part is bad that puts the book behind every other book.
That makes no sense, you don't know the quality of other books to make that determination! What if they have much worse paragraphs in the middle? What's so special about the first one expect being helpful to the lazy judges?
> Think about judging a 3 course meal.
Don't, you just add more irrelevance her
> What if they have much worse paragraphs in the middle?
Do you think a book that has a particularly bad first few pages is more or less likely to have a lot of poor content in the middle vs. a book that has a really good first few pages?
That's rather ironic because you both can't do that with a fantasy of a simplistic world of "first line bad = whole book bad"
> more or less likely
In the real messy world the correct answer is "you have no clue" neither when it comes to the whole universe of books nor to the specific subset of books that were accepted for the competition.
But I'm aware of the allure of the simple nature of a fantasy world where there is a very simple way to judge the quality of any art work, and where such quality is necessarily uniform, so a tiny sample is fine.