I’ve been listening to a podcast lately that’s broadly about history and a lot of the time also politics, and for this podcast the host pulls together info from sources he finds trustworthy and will note when he has included info from a source/book with a particular bias (but still included bc it had valuable info/context that couldn’t be found elsewhere).
This has made me interested in trying to read political and historical nonfiction for myself, but the last few times I’ve been to the bookstore or library I am just immediately overwhelmed because I do not have the energy to go through and investigate every author of every book I see to find out if it’s worth my time to read, or if it’s heavily biased and not a great overview of the subject.
How do others go about this? I feel so exhausted just thinking about it. It’s something I probably COULD do but like I said, it’s just so overwhelming I feel like my head will explode.
(I even saw this book called “How to Read Nonfiction Like a Professor” by Thomas C. Foster, and that sounded like it may be helpful, but the reviews were really mixed and I didn’t wanna just buy the first thing I saw about this.)
by SheSellsSeaShells-
2 Comments
Being well-informed is a labor intensive process.
In simplest terms, I would say to read things from authors you already know, or works cited by other writers etc that you trust. So if you were listening to a podcast and they cite some author or book, write that info down and use that as guidance for picking out a book to read.