Jacob Shymanski

the hell is the point of this what am i reading like this feels like a vanity project why am i reading this what is the point and i suppose this goes for fiction as well but especially for non-fiction you need to have a purpose and stick to it and that means having that roadmap and don't go off to the side don't do tangents everything has to serve the roadmap the through line have a purpose

And I'm going to assume that one of the reasons you enjoyed that book is that...

They weren't explaining the why beyond the what.

You just told me that there was an African emperor of Rome.

Very cool.

Now I know that.

Why?

How?

What happened that led to that?

What were the implications of that?

Explaining, not just telling the what.

Right, and when you say episode, you mean an episode of My Life in Books.

My Life in Books, yes.

So to be clear, the do for nonfiction in this case was answer the why beyond the what.

Don't just give us a list of what happened.

We want to know why.

Another book that I can recommend along these lines is Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green.

I really love John Green.

He's an American author and

And this book, Everything is Tuberculosis, is essentially, on paper, the history of tuberculosis.