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Comment by throw4847285 | Hacker News Reader

Yes, I read reviews to learn if a book is good or not. Quotes from the book that are carefully selected often help to showcase what the author is capable of, on top of a clear description of their writing style. I want the reviewer to sell me on what moved them.

That is different than whether or not the reviewer was compelled by the ideas in the book. If the reviewer is a good writer, then I've learned something. Then, I know that somebody who is a good writer thought the ideas in a book were interesting, which by the transitive property, implies the author being reviewed is also a good writer. In this case, I don't think the reviewer is a very interesting writer, so I'm not convinced that they are a good judge of interesting writing.

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That's interesting, here's a perspective from a different type of reader. I tend to read very old books, usually non-fiction, so 'reviews' are usually wikipedia articles, or references by other authors (the more references the more a classic it is).

usually it's the context around the book what people write about, where it was written, who wrote it, what was going on in their life. But if it's older perhaps not much is known, so the older it is increasingly it becomes at when it was read, where it was conserved, what it means to those who read it. If it's sufficiently old, there's several phases of 'rediscoveries' of the book, and the actual contents itself start losing importance as the book becomes more about past readers and how they influenced subsequent writing.

It would never occur to you to decide whether to read Luca Pacioli's accounting treatise based on some passages describing how you should keep your daily book, or whether to read Deuteronomy based on the headcount of some obscure tribe from old middle east, like there's no banger it's more about inmersion, and there isn't one way to absorb and interpret the content, because we are so far away from its writing, that the connection between the writer and reader is very faint.

So this feels normal to me, and the comparision felt funny, so I once again I found myself writing a hacker news comment

I say this with no malice, but you are weird. Being weird is cool! Reading nothing but historical manuscripts is rad! But the historical lens and the literary lens, as you yourself stated, are totally different.

Though, honestly, it would be fun to read reviews of ancient texts that are written like modern literary reviews. I guess we do get that, but only for new translations of the Odyssey or Beowulf or whatever. Those essays often dive into both the translation and the text in its original language (if the reviewer is fluent enough).

I bet you would love the Cairo Genizah.

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