hey lise! you seem to read a lot of non-fiction books and also seem to have no problem evaluating the quality of said books. I’ve been trying to read more but every time I try I have a hard time with knowing whether or not to trust it, because I’m trying to gain the knowledge on the first place, and I don’t want to read other people’s reviews because again the point is to see for myself. does that make sense? how do you get to the point where you can tell whether they’re good or not?
this is such a good ask and I've been thinking about it for a while because, like. it's a good question! how do I evaluate whether/how much I trust a nonfiction book? so I had to think about it a little and it comes down to a lot of different things.
I guess I will say off the bat that I personally trust academia and peer-reviewed sources as forms of knowledge more than peer or amateur knowledge; for all that it's flawed I think there is a great deal of value in that process. So that's going to inform a lot of this.
The big first one is about citations. Are they there? If they are there, who/what is being cited? How reliable are the sources that the author is relying on? I'm going to trust a lightly or uncited nonfiction book less, and I tend to try to consider quality of sources when they're there (is this science book relying on a lot of other pop science books, for instance, or is it directly citing the papers themselves). This isn't foolproof, obviously (none of this is) but it's one place to start to get a sense of how much research the author has done.
How transparent is the bias the author is writing with? This is a complicated one because it's not as simple as "clearly biased writer = don't trust" or "seemingly unbiased writer = trust", since sometimes writing with an awareness of one's bias can be better than pretending it's not there. But it does make me doubt things a little more if I can tell an author has an axe to grind. I'm not going to dismiss it out of hand but if their argument seems sketchy in some way I'm more likely to double-check it against another source.
Which, with that being said - check against another source! Make sure it's a reliable one (don't just ask Google AI, or whatever) but even if you can't find or parse the original research paper or whatever it can be helpful to poke around online looking for reliable resources to fact check against. (There are many other resources on how to identify reliable websites and I am lazy.)
Relatedly, this is somewhat tautological, but (especially on subjects I'm interested in) I read a lot of different books. I see what lines up from author to author and what doesn't line up from author to author. Who is citing who and who is disagreeing with who, and about what. Working through all that lets me (to some extent) synthesize and try to form my own opinion/understanding of the subject at hand.
You can't rely on this at all as a definitive fact, but it is worth, in some cases, paying attention to a gut check about "that doesn't sound right." It's important to be open to the fact that you might be wrong, but it can be a good spur to go and (again) double check against another source. If something sounds iffy or off, it might just be because it doesn't gel with your preconceived view of the world, yeah - or it could be bogus, or just overstated, or even the author taking a set of information that is true but making an interpretive leap you don't believe with. (Which is also an important distinction to be able to make - the difference between what is factually true and what is interpretation, which can be a very fuzzy line that isn't always easy to parse.)
Be open to being wrong, continually. It is hard to have someone tell you that you were wrong about something! But sometimes reading nonfiction is a process of reading something, thinking you learned something, and then learning something else that refutes the previous something. Tumblr calls this "net zero information" but that would imply that you gained nothing; I would argue that you've gained two very valuable things, actually: 1. the recognition that you can absorb and believe wrong information and 2. the ability to adjust that understanding in the face of new information. Research changes. Interpretation changes. Pretty much all fields of study are in a constant state of evolution.
Related to the above: notice when a book was published. This matters in some areas more than others but it is usually at least somewhat relevant. A book published in 1980 might still have good information in it, but it might also be missing things from the last 40 years. Older nonfiction books are worth reading (no, really, please, they are) but it's sometimes worth knowing when they are older.
Reading reviews is not a bad idea but I would read them after the book and I would, honestly, probably mostly not read them on Goodreads. Consider reading reviews from sources/people who have expertise in the field, who are writing from a place of at least some knowledge.
Take a look at the author's bio. Where were they trained? Where has their writing been published before? Who are they and what does that say about what their perspective might be? A former Secretary of Defense writing about US foreign policy will probably read differently than a history scholar (just guessing).
Who blurbed the book? Blurbs are definitely not end-all be-all and there's a lot that goes into them, but they can at least be informative one a couple of levels, both the marketing and the informational. What I mean by "marketing" is - who are the publishers targeting? What audience do they assume they are trying to reach? Who are the other authors/scholars they're associating with this work, and why might that be relevant? And on the "informational" side - are the blurbs coming from reputable sources with some scholarly heft/authority? I'm not going to take an endorsement from some random fiction author as seriously as I will from a scholar in the field.
and no one of these things is authoritative or always true or whatever. it's a combination of things taken together.
honestly some of this is just, like. practice. learning how to read, how to assess truth claims, and the more you read in a given subject area the more information you have to process and work through and compare against itself.
and, yeah. prepare to be wrong. I've definitely read stuff where I was like "this sound convincing and legit" and later run into information that made me doubt/question the conclusions the author drew. and then you have to decide what to do with that, because on the other hand despite what I just said, the answer isn't to throw out whatever you thought first in favor of the new information. you might've been right the first time. or you might not've been. be open to the possibility but don't assume that newer is truer.
hope any of that helps!
