Book post as literature

Busy!

A necessary part of the mainstream author's life, especially of non-fiction, is that they have to promote themselves by writing articles about how they wrote the book that is just being published.

(Obviously it helps if they already write regularly for the papers.)

Johann Hari promoting his new book about drug addiction.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/the-real-cause-of-addicti_b_6506936.html

Robert Macfarlane promoting his new book about landscape words.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/feb/27/robert-macfarlane-word-hoard-rewilding-landscape

I am reading Macfarlane's earlier book The Wild Places at the moment. It's often a really good book however undisguisedly a book written to the non-fiction formula of today.One of the best things about it is the studied deployment of the enhanced vocabulary that his new book centres on. But I haven't got time to think about the winter night on Ben Hope now, nor the holloways of Dorset.

The promotional-article-about-the-book, as evinced by the above, is also a genre with its own formula. For example, all those sentences that say "I did this interesting thing, I did that other interesting thing, while in still another interesting place I was emotionally stirred by hugely interesting things that I go on about in the book."

At the same time, in this internet world where all digitized products tend to become free, there's an awareness that the article will get more readers than the book itself, and accordingly it had better contain the heart of what the author would like us to know.

Because there are too many books, and we can't read any but a tiny fraction with the attention that they deserve and that all book-lovers would love to give but can't, it's a sensible faute-de-mieux to rely largely on these digests to gain a literate and informed view of what's going on in the world. Many of my clever colleagues in IT read no books at all; they have already forgotten Robert MacFarlane's name, but they remember something about the remarkable words for specific states of rain and ice; not the words themselves, but the fact that they existed.