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I feel the same way about a lot of non fiction, but not all. First, there's entertaining/pop non-fiction, like, say, Malcom Gladwell's stuff, which has a lot of fluff but at least you enjoy the reading. There are history books and memoirs that are just interesting - for example I've recently went through the entire series of Churchill's WWII memoirs, they're mostly awesome, though I did skip a couple of less interesting chapters. For these I prefer audiobooks while driving, which make it easier for me to focus. Then there are CS books where you can pick and choose chapters and don't have to read the entire thing; they just go way deeper than blog posts, so if you want to REALLY know a subject, you better buy a book or two. I don't mean books like Clean Code or The Pragmatic Programmer, etc which I almost never read in their entirety and can be summarized in 10% of their length, but more deep guides to things like Information Retrieval, NLP, Database Internals, etc. |
This has soured me on the genre of pop-nonfiction in general, because my trust is absolutely zero at this point (it's not like Gladwell is the only confabulist there) - and if I have to cross-reference every single fact, I might as well just skip to the bibliography section. If there is one.
That has, in fact, become my criterion for most non-fiction I buy directly (without reference/recommendation) - does it have a bibliography section. I recommend it, because at the very least it gives you a great shopping list for round two on the subject :)