Katherine Mangu-Ward has said much of nonfiction writing is bloated with fluff. She says many books should have been magazine articles. I’ve heard this before and have to agree.
Over the past year, I’ve borrowed at least 100 nonfiction books from the library and tried to read all of them. Some have been quite good. Others, not so much. A few were unreadable.
All of them contained a bit of fluff. Some provide details of mundane incidents that drag on for pages and pages. Many repeat their main points over and over throughout different chapters in an attempt to hammer home a hypothesis or make a point through over-saturation.
If I am enjoying the book, I’ll skip entire sections entirely*. Especially if it’s an anecdote that is overly detailed or, god forbid, another retelling of the marshmallow test.
So far, I’ve never come to the end of a book and thought, “I missed something important, so I better go back and reread that section.”
This has made reading much more enjoyable.
*I do the same thing when watching TV shows or movies. I always fast forward past trite love scenes and almost always skip the “back in history”/time shift scenes.