Lots of good points.

What people have to say and think about what they've read is more important than that they've read it and or liked it.

I've known a few people who don't read at all who were fine people, but I don't think we'd have much to talk about over the long term.

People who read fluffy "Chick Lit" don't bother me as long as they understand that what they're reading is not terribly profound. After all, a lot of what I read is "genre fiction." I am turned off by people who read Dan Brown or The Secret or various quack self-help books and believe that it's really great literature and/or philosophy.

I think it was Lenin who said, "It's one thing to be smart about dumb things, it's quite another to be dumb about smart things."


I agree that biographies provide a limited perspective on history, but good biographies can often say a lot about history. I also agree that they seem to be popular with older people and I'm not sure why that is exactly, but I think part of it is that biographies seem to be marketed by the publishers a lot more heavily than other kinds of historical non-fiction. I could be wrong but it seems like I see more reviews of biographies in the Washington Post book section or flogged by the author on Charlie Rose or The Daily Show than other kinds of historical books.

Perhaps its because biographies are easier to summarize. It's easier for a quick review of talk show blurb to say "It's the biography of FDR and its pretty good" than it would be to explain "It's a survey of the complex social, economic and political upheavals in the US in the between-the-wars period with special attention on the causes of the Great Depression, American Isolationism, the great wave of Immigration and Keynesian economic policies."

The latter would probably be more interesting and more thorough, but it's harder to sell, I imagine.