Thanks for writing this! I completely agree with your comments, that to win a review needs to (a) clearly state the thesis of the book; (b) critique it, either with original thoughts or original data. I'd also add (c) have a clear structure and clear formatting - a surprising number of the reviews failed on this and were rather less enjoyable to read than they could have been. Write 10,000 words if you want, but don't write a wall of text.
For some cases, you also need (d) give some basic context to the book and justify why the book/topic is worth reviewing. The Rhyming Dictionary did this par excellence; the review of Asquith was a mostly well-written review which is nevertheless utterly incomprehensible even to most people with a strong interest in UK politics, let alone to the average ACX reader.
I would also agree that in order to be in the top running you need to choose a book which there is something to learn from in order to really get the high marks. There were a few books which tried to draw life lessons from a book which didn't really have anything to offer, or where the author is wildly unreliable (e.g. Dan Ariely, Peter Turchin). Perhaps the best review I read which didn't have life lessons, but which did have something of a critique, was The Hunt for Red October.
I read 61 of the reviews, including three of the eventual finalists, two honourable mentions, and yours. In my notes I gave yours 7/10 (I considered 8+ to be finalist-worthy); my notes suggest I thought it was well-written and generally pretty clear about what we do and don't know but that, since you quote a bunch of highly speculative and frankly ridiculous theories about Akhenaten, you could have done more to poor cold water on them. Plus, not a major thing but the neither the bust of Nefertiti nor King Tut's death mask is the most famous ancient Egyptian artefact (see https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=nefertiti%2Crosetta%2Ctutankhamun&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3).
Thanks for this comment! You have my admiration for having read so many of the reviews.
... And I have no idea why I never thought of the Rosetta Stone when writing mine. Although, I'm not sure I agree with you that it's more famous than the bust or (especially) the mask, Google Ngram data notwithstanding. Certainly more important and impactful as an archeological find, but probably not as recognizable?
I think it's definitely more famous than the bust. The mask... I think the mask probably gets depicted a lot more in books and on posters, but also most people are unaware that it's specifically King Tut's mask rather than just any old mask of an Egyptian pharoah. To be honest my thinking when writing was that it was 1. mask 2. stone 3. possibly the bust, but then I checked ngrams to verify my intuition and it was overwhelming in favour of the stone.
I don't know if the bust is even third - Claude suggests other famous artefacts are the Narmer palette, Cleopatra's Needles, the mummy of Ramesses II, the seated scribe statue, and the Book of the Dead papyrus scrolls; intuitively I'd say the Book of the Dead is in third place, I could buy that the bust is in fourth. The mummy of Ramesses II ought to be a lot more famous - he's probably the second or third most famous ancient Egyptian (thanks to the Old Testament, Percy Shelley, and Civilisation V) yet I had no idea that we have his mummy.
Ngrams analysis seems potentially confounded by the fact that Rosetta is a simpler word than Tutankhamun or Nefertiti, and also has been used to refer to other things, like translation software. Plus it has probably been discussed much more compared to depicted in images for the mask or the bust. Anyway none of this matters much and hinges a lot on what it means to be "famous", which is obviously not well-defined. Your proposed ranking makes sense.
Also who's more famous than Ramesses II? I guess it's between him, Cleopatra, and Tutankhamun?
> I read 61 of the reviews, including three of the eventual finalists, two honourable mentions
And I thought I was overambitious because I read 15! Just out of curiosity, did your scores align with the broader ACX readership? Were those five the top five that you scored? And which ones do you think should've made it but weren't selected?
Of the finalists, I read How Language Began, Nine Lives, and the Complete Rhyming Dictionary. I thought all of them were deserving finalists. I read Catkin and Road of the King from among the honourable mentions; I thought the Catkin review was fine but nothing special, and the Road of the King review was honestly pretty bad.
Other reviews I thought were final-worthy:
- Politics on the Edge (though I didn't really expect it to be a finalist given that no-one outside the UK knows who Rory Stewart is)
Good writeup. I entered the contest and struggled with it. In part because I just couldn't muster the effort to write a massive essay/"review" of a difficult book. I got bored trying to summarize the book for an audience of people that hadn't read it, and found it difficult to write anything original without giving a proper summary first.
It does seem to me that the choice of book is crucial. ACX is written by a psychiatrist, and many of its readers are programmers. So you want it to be something *adjacent* to those fields, but not directly *in* them. Too close and it will get nerd-swiped by people arguing with you, too far away and no one will care. It's kind of telling that no one has won for reviewing a classic programming book like "The Art of Computer Programming" and that he promised extra attention for fiction this year but still one of the few fiction books to make it in was... comic books.
I'm worried that what people want is a false confidence in some sort of crank theory. Like, the Georgian economics book review. Great essay! Really made me aware of Georgian economics for the first time and made it seem like a great idea. At the same time, I am keenly aware that I am *not* an economist, and that most mainstream economists don't really buy into Georgian economics all that much. So many the pros know something that I don't...? I hope this book review contest doesn't become a vehicle to push fringe views onto an audience that is smart but naiive.
Readers criticized the economic views in my Jane Jacobs essay plenty, so I'm not too worried about your last point! ACX readers are extremely epistemically aware, though of course there certainly exist some biases in the community.
Thanks for posting this. I do think you’re correct in general about the length, but the audience doesn’t always vote for the longest:
> Each time voting concludes and the winners are announced, it turns out that the most popular one is by far the longest. The review of The Dawn of Everything had 9,500 words. This was remarkably short for a winner: Progress and Poverty had 20,600 words, and The Educated Mind, which won last year, had almost 25,000.
This is only if you exclude that the review with the most votes last year (Ngal’s Saga) only had 6,000. I’d say the most popular were 9.5k, then 20k, then 6k. Last year one of the shortest finalists was the most popular. Of course, it was by a very strong writer. Again, I do think you’re correct in general, but the audience isn’t completely smitten by word count.
I’m curious, do you happen to know if there have been any long reviews (say 20k+) that were submitted but didn’t make the finalists?
Yeah, I didn't go and get a word count of every single review, so you're right that it's not necessarily "literally" the longest. But it's close to that, which is interesting in itself! The actual lesson here is that brevity isn't particularly rewarded, so as you work on your review, you don't need to worry about it too much (though you do need to make sure your review is never *boring*)
I know there's a review of Sadly, Porn that clocks in at 41,500 words in this year's edition. Several commenters said they like it, though I don't know what to make of it since I didn't read it except the last two paragraphs where it reveals the author didn't actually read the book
Best passage: “There isn’t much to say. Just write good. Aim to make your review more enjoyable to read than the book you’re reviewing, since otherwise there isn’t much point in reading your review: people should just read the book instead.”
The reason? “just write GOOD” rings nicely in the ear, whether intentional or unintentional. Don’t rewrite the sentence—I read so many professional articles with grammatical errors that I’m not sure that there’s a line anymore.
Plus, for me it works nicely with the next sentence, which strikes similar to musical covers: cover something that works well with your style, that shows off your knowledge and talent, that isn’t too famous, that’s something where you can add your own spin. Or, briefly, cover b-sides. When done well you’ll get “If I were a boy,” “I will always love you,” or “Respect,” where the musical cover exceeds the original.
Thanks! I wondered about that "Just write good" sentence, too. It came to me naturally and it just felt perfect for some reason despite its unusual grammar. It's more musical, maybe. "Good" is more percussive than "well".
Will read it then, but first comment out now: You might want to look up "Motel of the Mysteries" by David Macaulay - yep, the children(?)-book author of "Pyramid"-fame. It shows the conclusion "archaeology can tell us only that much" - by having archaeologist of the future speculating about our "rituals" - getting most hilariously wrong.
Thanks for writing this! I completely agree with your comments, that to win a review needs to (a) clearly state the thesis of the book; (b) critique it, either with original thoughts or original data. I'd also add (c) have a clear structure and clear formatting - a surprising number of the reviews failed on this and were rather less enjoyable to read than they could have been. Write 10,000 words if you want, but don't write a wall of text.
For some cases, you also need (d) give some basic context to the book and justify why the book/topic is worth reviewing. The Rhyming Dictionary did this par excellence; the review of Asquith was a mostly well-written review which is nevertheless utterly incomprehensible even to most people with a strong interest in UK politics, let alone to the average ACX reader.
I would also agree that in order to be in the top running you need to choose a book which there is something to learn from in order to really get the high marks. There were a few books which tried to draw life lessons from a book which didn't really have anything to offer, or where the author is wildly unreliable (e.g. Dan Ariely, Peter Turchin). Perhaps the best review I read which didn't have life lessons, but which did have something of a critique, was The Hunt for Red October.
I read 61 of the reviews, including three of the eventual finalists, two honourable mentions, and yours. In my notes I gave yours 7/10 (I considered 8+ to be finalist-worthy); my notes suggest I thought it was well-written and generally pretty clear about what we do and don't know but that, since you quote a bunch of highly speculative and frankly ridiculous theories about Akhenaten, you could have done more to poor cold water on them. Plus, not a major thing but the neither the bust of Nefertiti nor King Tut's death mask is the most famous ancient Egyptian artefact (see https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=nefertiti%2Crosetta%2Ctutankhamun&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3).
Thanks for this comment! You have my admiration for having read so many of the reviews.
... And I have no idea why I never thought of the Rosetta Stone when writing mine. Although, I'm not sure I agree with you that it's more famous than the bust or (especially) the mask, Google Ngram data notwithstanding. Certainly more important and impactful as an archeological find, but probably not as recognizable?
I think it's definitely more famous than the bust. The mask... I think the mask probably gets depicted a lot more in books and on posters, but also most people are unaware that it's specifically King Tut's mask rather than just any old mask of an Egyptian pharoah. To be honest my thinking when writing was that it was 1. mask 2. stone 3. possibly the bust, but then I checked ngrams to verify my intuition and it was overwhelming in favour of the stone.
I don't know if the bust is even third - Claude suggests other famous artefacts are the Narmer palette, Cleopatra's Needles, the mummy of Ramesses II, the seated scribe statue, and the Book of the Dead papyrus scrolls; intuitively I'd say the Book of the Dead is in third place, I could buy that the bust is in fourth. The mummy of Ramesses II ought to be a lot more famous - he's probably the second or third most famous ancient Egyptian (thanks to the Old Testament, Percy Shelley, and Civilisation V) yet I had no idea that we have his mummy.
Ngrams analysis seems potentially confounded by the fact that Rosetta is a simpler word than Tutankhamun or Nefertiti, and also has been used to refer to other things, like translation software. Plus it has probably been discussed much more compared to depicted in images for the mask or the bust. Anyway none of this matters much and hinges a lot on what it means to be "famous", which is obviously not well-defined. Your proposed ranking makes sense.
Also who's more famous than Ramesses II? I guess it's between him, Cleopatra, and Tutankhamun?
Cleopatra seems to me quite clearly the most famous ancient Egyptian, by quite a long way.
> I read 61 of the reviews, including three of the eventual finalists, two honourable mentions
And I thought I was overambitious because I read 15! Just out of curiosity, did your scores align with the broader ACX readership? Were those five the top five that you scored? And which ones do you think should've made it but weren't selected?
Sorry, just realised I forgot to reply to this!
Of the finalists, I read How Language Began, Nine Lives, and the Complete Rhyming Dictionary. I thought all of them were deserving finalists. I read Catkin and Road of the King from among the honourable mentions; I thought the Catkin review was fine but nothing special, and the Road of the King review was honestly pretty bad.
Other reviews I thought were final-worthy:
- Politics on the Edge (though I didn't really expect it to be a finalist given that no-one outside the UK knows who Rory Stewart is)
- Eothen
- (Maybe) Food of the Gods
- The Hunt for Red October
- Babel
- (Maybe) Practical Ethics
- For Whom the Bell Tolls
Good writeup. I entered the contest and struggled with it. In part because I just couldn't muster the effort to write a massive essay/"review" of a difficult book. I got bored trying to summarize the book for an audience of people that hadn't read it, and found it difficult to write anything original without giving a proper summary first.
It does seem to me that the choice of book is crucial. ACX is written by a psychiatrist, and many of its readers are programmers. So you want it to be something *adjacent* to those fields, but not directly *in* them. Too close and it will get nerd-swiped by people arguing with you, too far away and no one will care. It's kind of telling that no one has won for reviewing a classic programming book like "The Art of Computer Programming" and that he promised extra attention for fiction this year but still one of the few fiction books to make it in was... comic books.
I'm worried that what people want is a false confidence in some sort of crank theory. Like, the Georgian economics book review. Great essay! Really made me aware of Georgian economics for the first time and made it seem like a great idea. At the same time, I am keenly aware that I am *not* an economist, and that most mainstream economists don't really buy into Georgian economics all that much. So many the pros know something that I don't...? I hope this book review contest doesn't become a vehicle to push fringe views onto an audience that is smart but naiive.
Readers criticized the economic views in my Jane Jacobs essay plenty, so I'm not too worried about your last point! ACX readers are extremely epistemically aware, though of course there certainly exist some biases in the community.
What what your book, if you don't mind telling?
Thanks for posting this. I do think you’re correct in general about the length, but the audience doesn’t always vote for the longest:
> Each time voting concludes and the winners are announced, it turns out that the most popular one is by far the longest. The review of The Dawn of Everything had 9,500 words. This was remarkably short for a winner: Progress and Poverty had 20,600 words, and The Educated Mind, which won last year, had almost 25,000.
This is only if you exclude that the review with the most votes last year (Ngal’s Saga) only had 6,000. I’d say the most popular were 9.5k, then 20k, then 6k. Last year one of the shortest finalists was the most popular. Of course, it was by a very strong writer. Again, I do think you’re correct in general, but the audience isn’t completely smitten by word count.
I’m curious, do you happen to know if there have been any long reviews (say 20k+) that were submitted but didn’t make the finalists?
Yeah, I didn't go and get a word count of every single review, so you're right that it's not necessarily "literally" the longest. But it's close to that, which is interesting in itself! The actual lesson here is that brevity isn't particularly rewarded, so as you work on your review, you don't need to worry about it too much (though you do need to make sure your review is never *boring*)
I know there's a review of Sadly, Porn that clocks in at 41,500 words in this year's edition. Several commenters said they like it, though I don't know what to make of it since I didn't read it except the last two paragraphs where it reveals the author didn't actually read the book
Best passage: “There isn’t much to say. Just write good. Aim to make your review more enjoyable to read than the book you’re reviewing, since otherwise there isn’t much point in reading your review: people should just read the book instead.”
The reason? “just write GOOD” rings nicely in the ear, whether intentional or unintentional. Don’t rewrite the sentence—I read so many professional articles with grammatical errors that I’m not sure that there’s a line anymore.
Plus, for me it works nicely with the next sentence, which strikes similar to musical covers: cover something that works well with your style, that shows off your knowledge and talent, that isn’t too famous, that’s something where you can add your own spin. Or, briefly, cover b-sides. When done well you’ll get “If I were a boy,” “I will always love you,” or “Respect,” where the musical cover exceeds the original.
Thanks! I wondered about that "Just write good" sentence, too. It came to me naturally and it just felt perfect for some reason despite its unusual grammar. It's more musical, maybe. "Good" is more percussive than "well".
Can you link to your essay about pharaoh Akhenaten?
It's unpublished (except in that giant Google Doc) but I'll release it next week!
Will read it then, but first comment out now: You might want to look up "Motel of the Mysteries" by David Macaulay - yep, the children(?)-book author of "Pyramid"-fame. It shows the conclusion "archaeology can tell us only that much" - by having archaeologist of the future speculating about our "rituals" - getting most hilariously wrong.
Oooh looks fun!