Joshua, if there is a science fiction book you like and would want to write a positive review of, I will pair with you and write a negative review of it. I hate almost all sci fi.
I don’t discuss books often, so I’m finding this difficult to imagine: surely it’s difficult to find a book which polarises people *for the right reasons* that would make an adversarial book review interesting.
And more often than not, after discussion of the book, one person changes their minds, or at least puts themselves in the “I can see why somebody else may like/hate this book” position.
In other words, I’ll be very impressed if somebody finds a way to do it effectively. Good luck.
I would nominate Lord Foul's Bane from The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant series.
I want to like the book and have tried reading it twice. And given up both times. From conversations with other people, I am not the only person who has given up on this book. Nevertheless, it (and the series) definitely seems to have a fan base. This might fit the bill that Yair was thinking about.
"For a fleeting moment, could one of the sleepers have seen him, they would have thought that they beheld an old weary hobbit, shrunken by the years that had carried him far beyond his time, beyond friends and kin, and the fields and streams of youth, an old starved pitiable thing."
Covenant is a pain, but there are reasons why he's like that. The clash is between "this is an ordinary guy thrown into what could be a dream, what could be a real place" and our expectations of what should happen - he becomes The Hero because this is The Hero's Journey, right?
Yeah, it's a tough series to get into. There's a *lot* where it's very clear the spectre of Tolkien is looming over the worldbuilding, but then Donaldson has an original (or at least it was original at the time, now everyone knows about isekai) take on it.
And his protagonist (you can't really call him a hero) is very vehemently in denial of the reality of the new world he finds himself in, for very good reasons (as he states, a leper cannot afford to believe in miracle cures or spontaneous remission or even that he can relax his vigilance) but which then starts off the entire cascade of bad decisions and tragedies which take up the rest of the book (and indeed, the rest of the three trilogies).
It's very different to the High Fantasy imitators in the immediate wake of Tolkien, and to what George R.R. Martin was/is doing with "Game of Thrones". There's a degree of Martin's take-down of the tropes of high fantasy in it, but for vastly differing reasons: Covenant does not deny that heroism, honour, and selflessness exist, but he insists that power is guilt and by extension guilt is power: you can only be effective in gaining and wielding power when you have lost your innocence and done terrible things, and the only redemption (and maybe not even hoping for redemption) is to use that power in defence of the innocent.
Hey, boy. I encountered the first books in my later teens when I was thirsting for "more like Tolkien" (and not "like Shannara"), and it was different. If you can get past the VERY BAD THING that happens early on in Covenant's first visit to The Land, you may be able to get through the rest of the book(s).
The final quadrilogy does rewrite some of the established lore, and it's tougher going in parts (large parts) since plainly Donaldson re-thought much of his world and what he was doing with it (the idea of the Creator gets dropped pretty early on in the entire opus after he makes a fleeting appearance), but he does end on a heroic, redemptive note.
And it did expand my vocabulary a lot, even if Covenant makes the purple prose an entire thesaurus worth of synonyms for same, and uses the terms in his own idiosyncratic meaning. He can be florid, to put it mildly!
But I loved (and continue to love) Lord Mhoram and Saltheart Foamfollower because they're allowed to be heroic and virtuous without any of Martin's "and this is dumb because good people die from sticking to their principles because this is a crapsack world" editorialising.
The rest of the series is very good, and I am a fan. Lord Foul's Bane is indeed terrible, though, and should probably just be skipped outright in favor of the summary at the start of the second book.
Can one skip the first book and just start with the second (including summary, I guess) and still have things make enough sense for this to be a good use of reading time?
Yes, I think so. Obviously I can't say so from first-hand experience, but I do think that's probably the best way to approach the series.
Be aware, though, Donaldson is an author that loves nothing more than to torture his characters and watch them suffer before letting them have their (mostly) happy ending; his are basically "feel bad" books, but that's part of what makes reading them feel very intense.
It depends. I could write a good scathing review of the Hunchback of Notre Dame purely on the first forty pages or so, in which there stubbornly refuses to be a character or a plot. Simply architecture.
Leave the "but the rest of the book's really quite good!" to the other guy.
(You could also take a book like Gerrold's, which ends in the middle and the end, and review each ending.)
I hate lots of sci-fi that I see people here recommending. I dislike most sci fi and would enjoy being the vituperative member of a pair reviewing one of those often-recommended books, or probably pretty much any random sci fi. So long as someone can get me the name of the book within a couple weeks I am pretty certain to say yes. That sounds like fun to me, and I had already decided not to review a book I’m interested in this year. Have been trying to think of easy quirky alternatives.
A clarification on the rules - you've asked for reviews in Google Docs format. I've been thinking of writing a review in an interactive format which would need HTML instead but could easily be shared on Google Drive. Is this against the rules?
Scott generally posts finalist reviews here on his Substack. This would presumably not be possible with an HTML interactive review, so I don't think it would work.
Because I've been thinking along similar lines: Would it work to write a review in Google Docs and link to an HTML version which has interactivity added in (but the text remains the same)? That way Scott can post on Substack and readers who want the interactive bits can click to those. The HTML version would be on its own anonymized website, so wouldn't reveal who the author is.
The main rule I can see this breaking is the injunction against not submitting reviews that have been published elsewhere, if the HTML version counts as publishing elsewhere.
That does introduce significant extra complications to keeping it anonymous as well as publication issues, which is a shame. I thought I had seen some Twine embedded on Substack elsewhere but I must have been mistaken. I somehow doubt if the codebase will be updated anytime soon so that idea may have to wait.
My last review included a link to a brief video posted on Vimeo. It was watched quite a few times during period when people were reading reviews, so that worked ok.
Yes - I need to show all entries on Google Docs, and I need to show all finalists on this blog, so anything which is too complicated to work in those places would force me to switch to a different contest format.
Is self-plagiarism frowned upon? For example, I am thinking about publishing an article on my personal substack which draws on arguments outlined in a particular book (though the article itself is not a book review). If I use paragraphs from that article in my book review, would that be unacceptable?
Coincidentally, I have written my views on the ethics of plagiarism if that is a helpful reference.
To what degree is AI allowed in writing the reviews? It would be nice to have that specified in the rules to ensure a level playing field for the submissions.
This can't really be enforced, so we'll have an AI-slop baseline either way. The actual competition is to do better than that, hopefully humanity is still up for the challenge...
Unless you're hypothesizing that ACX readers who work at frontier labs will be using secret super-advanced models that no one else knows about, I don't see how there's really much of a "level playing field" issue. In practice, I expect that if a review comes out sounding like AI, preliminary voters will punish it harshly and it won't make the finals. The usual reason to ban AI submissions is for spam control (since it makes it easier to write a review than to read it), but this doesn't seem to have been much of a problem last year and LLMs could already do longform writing then, so maybe Scott just isn't worried about it?
I meant that different authors might use AI differently to different levels of advantage based on what they expect is acceptable for the contest. One author might think that co-writing with AI is totally acceptable so long as it is in their own voice, another might write the whole thing and use AI for iterative feedback to improve the drafts, another might feel it is a zero AI project. I think all could pass the threshold of not sounding like AI, but at some point it might pass what Scott wishes his contest to be.
I agree that spam probably won't be a big issue. I also think that with no commentary from Scott, the default rule is: don't make your AI use detectable enough that voters punish you.
I'd be very reluctant, but if it's just "tidy this up so any grammatical errors, duplications, misspellings and dangling sentences that trail off are corrected", okay.
If it's "here are some notes, write this review for me", hell no.
A lot of lost works from the Classical era are only known by mentions in a surviving work, so I say go for it! A review that is an imaginative reconstruction, so long as you do stick to what is known, isn't outside the bounds.
Scott, formatting question. What's the best way in google docs to do footnotes, such that they can easily transfer to Substack? Eg should I write [1] in the body of the review and then list footnote 1 at the end? If I use google docs' built-in footnotes system does that make it really awkward?
And women: Start brewing up some coffee for the guys, and check supplies of the massage oil you’ll need for giving them neck and shoulder rubs while they are writing. Some of you may also want to order some flavored lube. 🖕🖕🖕
What counts as a book for review purposes? The category strikes me as somewhat fuzzy. For example: is a webcomic a book? Is a visual novel a book? Et cetera. Previously, when book reviews were the only thing available, my impression was that bookhood was interpreted liberally and those sorts of edge cases would count as books; but with nonbook reviews now also existing I'm a lot less confident about how the edge cases are going to be adjudicated, and accordingly figure I should ask.
- I don't want to be spammed with 100 Google emails of "X decided to share this with you"
- My scott@slatestarcodex.com address is sort of a wrapper around my real email address and doesn't always work well with Google Docs. My real email address isn't exactly secret but I probably don't want it on a top level ACX post.
- Sometimes I have an assistant collect the finalists into a final doc and I want them to be able to access them too.
But seriously, if this hasn't been decided yet, I would strongly urge Scott to say no. There was a finalist last year that was a bit of an edge case--the AlphaSchool reviewer had some personal connection to the AlphaSchool founders--and it gave many of us gross marketing vibes. Not saying that you, as a giant of modernism, wouldn't be fair to yourself. But if it's known that door is open, then it creates bad incentives.
I would have to reluctantly agree here. Had the AlphaSchool thing not poisoned the well, I'd be open to the experiment, but after that I can't set the precedent of "sell us your own product".
Not a self review, but turned out (so far as I recall) to be someone associated with the school, plus there was controversy over a call (alleged) on the blog or other social media site of founder of school calling people to go vote for the review on here.
The call was not just alleged. It definitely was there on Shitter at the time people began talking about the matter , and it stayed up throughout the period while we discussed it. I checked for it several weeks later and it was still up. And btw the Shitter post did not describe how our contest was set up. It did not ask people to come here, read the finalists, and vote for their favorite 3, adding that in the poster’s view the Alpha School review was best, and suggesting that the poster’s followers would likely agree. It just exhorted readers to come here and vote for the Alpha School review.
He is a parent, but is also a bigshot in organization optimization — consults to big companies. It’s clear from his book and his linked-in that a major area of expertise for him is marketing. When he was asked whether he had been employed by Alpha School he said no, but that he had given them some unpaid assistance with marketing ideas.
Also, since the contest he has not been an ACX subscriber. I know because the guy’s own Substack blog lists the blogs he reads, and we are not on there. So it’s unlikely he entered the contest just as part of participating in the community. Given his probable income, it’s also unlikely he’d have been motivated by the prize money. He can probably make sums that large merely by farting a couple times in some CEO’s office. So only plausible reason for his writing and entering the review was to boost Alpha School
Always something to look forward to. Hopefully the median this year will be more like last year's surprisingly-good showing than 2024's.
Guess I'll wait for next year (or more likely, forget once again), never seems to be enough time for cramming in additional book reading material and some light writing on top of multiple prolific Substacks and web fictions. The best review is the one that gets written at all, so that's the most likely solution of [potential review subjects | materiel already loaded in queue]. If The ACX Commentariat can get a review, surely blogs themselves or particularly meaty posts thereof are also fair game. Like I'm pretty sure someone has attempted The Gervais Principle before...
(I guess it'd be technically within bounds this year to attempt A Map That Reflects The Territory?)
The modern man is whipped up into an anxious mess by social media, continually repeating doom and gloom about Trump and middle east wars. Reading books is no simple escape- every modern fiction author lazily shoves in their takes on the same two tired points. I will improve myself and the ACX discourse as a whole by instead reviewing from the classics.
___ moby dick
It came in as a sort of brief interlude and solo between more extensive performances. I take it that this part of the bill must have run something like this:
“Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States. “WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL. “BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN.”
"Readers will vote for the ~10 finalists this spring"
Spring has already begun over here, but I guess you mean starting after that due date. 🙂
So am I right to expect a post in late May with links to the submitted (and spamfiltered) Google Docs and instructions how to actually conduct that voting?
In 2026, this title continues to lead the arcade sports genre by offering more than just quick matches—it provides a long-term journey toward becoming a court legend. https://basketballstars-2.io
1. Is there any possibility that a review, if of course selected and published, might include some simple design embellishments such as different fonts or changes to font sizes, as long as these are embedded in the submitted text and are intrinsic to the review?
Anyone fancy doing an adversarial book review? Pick a book one person loves, and another hates, and try to write a book review both can agree with?
Subject to finding the right book, and my range is rather limited, that sounds excellent.
The risk with fiction, though, would be that it becomes an argument of taste.
I would also be interested in this.
I am also interested. Not sure how to coordinate this.
Joshua, if there is a science fiction book you like and would want to write a positive review of, I will pair with you and write a negative review of it. I hate almost all sci fi.
I don’t discuss books often, so I’m finding this difficult to imagine: surely it’s difficult to find a book which polarises people *for the right reasons* that would make an adversarial book review interesting.
And more often than not, after discussion of the book, one person changes their minds, or at least puts themselves in the “I can see why somebody else may like/hate this book” position.
In other words, I’ll be very impressed if somebody finds a way to do it effectively. Good luck.
I would nominate Lord Foul's Bane from The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant series.
I want to like the book and have tried reading it twice. And given up both times. From conversations with other people, I am not the only person who has given up on this book. Nevertheless, it (and the series) definitely seems to have a fan base. This might fit the bill that Yair was thinking about.
Around 20 years ago there was a public access program in San Francisco of some young women reading that novel. The original website is offline now, but has been archived https://web.archive.org/web/20230928152422/https://fantasybedtimehour.com/
Lord Foul's Bane is like Lord of the Rings if Gollum was the hero.
The Gollum that Sam does not see:
"For a fleeting moment, could one of the sleepers have seen him, they would have thought that they beheld an old weary hobbit, shrunken by the years that had carried him far beyond his time, beyond friends and kin, and the fields and streams of youth, an old starved pitiable thing."
Covenant is a pain, but there are reasons why he's like that. The clash is between "this is an ordinary guy thrown into what could be a dream, what could be a real place" and our expectations of what should happen - he becomes The Hero because this is The Hero's Journey, right?
Wrong.
Yeah, it's a tough series to get into. There's a *lot* where it's very clear the spectre of Tolkien is looming over the worldbuilding, but then Donaldson has an original (or at least it was original at the time, now everyone knows about isekai) take on it.
And his protagonist (you can't really call him a hero) is very vehemently in denial of the reality of the new world he finds himself in, for very good reasons (as he states, a leper cannot afford to believe in miracle cures or spontaneous remission or even that he can relax his vigilance) but which then starts off the entire cascade of bad decisions and tragedies which take up the rest of the book (and indeed, the rest of the three trilogies).
It's very different to the High Fantasy imitators in the immediate wake of Tolkien, and to what George R.R. Martin was/is doing with "Game of Thrones". There's a degree of Martin's take-down of the tropes of high fantasy in it, but for vastly differing reasons: Covenant does not deny that heroism, honour, and selflessness exist, but he insists that power is guilt and by extension guilt is power: you can only be effective in gaining and wielding power when you have lost your innocence and done terrible things, and the only redemption (and maybe not even hoping for redemption) is to use that power in defence of the innocent.
Hey, boy. I encountered the first books in my later teens when I was thirsting for "more like Tolkien" (and not "like Shannara"), and it was different. If you can get past the VERY BAD THING that happens early on in Covenant's first visit to The Land, you may be able to get through the rest of the book(s).
The final quadrilogy does rewrite some of the established lore, and it's tougher going in parts (large parts) since plainly Donaldson re-thought much of his world and what he was doing with it (the idea of the Creator gets dropped pretty early on in the entire opus after he makes a fleeting appearance), but he does end on a heroic, redemptive note.
And it did expand my vocabulary a lot, even if Covenant makes the purple prose an entire thesaurus worth of synonyms for same, and uses the terms in his own idiosyncratic meaning. He can be florid, to put it mildly!
But I loved (and continue to love) Lord Mhoram and Saltheart Foamfollower because they're allowed to be heroic and virtuous without any of Martin's "and this is dumb because good people die from sticking to their principles because this is a crapsack world" editorialising.
The rest of the series is very good, and I am a fan. Lord Foul's Bane is indeed terrible, though, and should probably just be skipped outright in favor of the summary at the start of the second book.
Can one skip the first book and just start with the second (including summary, I guess) and still have things make enough sense for this to be a good use of reading time?
Yes, I think so. Obviously I can't say so from first-hand experience, but I do think that's probably the best way to approach the series.
Be aware, though, Donaldson is an author that loves nothing more than to torture his characters and watch them suffer before letting them have their (mostly) happy ending; his are basically "feel bad" books, but that's part of what makes reading them feel very intense.
It depends. I could write a good scathing review of the Hunchback of Notre Dame purely on the first forty pages or so, in which there stubbornly refuses to be a character or a plot. Simply architecture.
Leave the "but the rest of the book's really quite good!" to the other guy.
(You could also take a book like Gerrold's, which ends in the middle and the end, and review each ending.)
I've never done that before, but I like to review adversarial books:
https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2024/09/25/orientalism-vs-dangerous-knowledge/
https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2022/05/12/the-apotheosis-of-captain-cook-vs-how-natives-think/
https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2010/12/28/a-critic-of-james-scott-yes-they-do-exist/ (that one discusses my general interest in oppositional pairings, listing a few more I'd read earlier)
Uhg, these reviews are very dense and assume the blog reader knows the books/subject matter. If you decide to write a review try to explain more.
I hate lots of sci-fi that I see people here recommending. I dislike most sci fi and would enjoy being the vituperative member of a pair reviewing one of those often-recommended books, or probably pretty much any random sci fi. So long as someone can get me the name of the book within a couple weeks I am pretty certain to say yes. That sounds like fun to me, and I had already decided not to review a book I’m interested in this year. Have been trying to think of easy quirky alternatives.
I'm interested in this. Did you find a way to coordinate this?
A clarification on the rules - you've asked for reviews in Google Docs format. I've been thinking of writing a review in an interactive format which would need HTML instead but could easily be shared on Google Drive. Is this against the rules?
Scott generally posts finalist reviews here on his Substack. This would presumably not be possible with an HTML interactive review, so I don't think it would work.
Because I've been thinking along similar lines: Would it work to write a review in Google Docs and link to an HTML version which has interactivity added in (but the text remains the same)? That way Scott can post on Substack and readers who want the interactive bits can click to those. The HTML version would be on its own anonymized website, so wouldn't reveal who the author is.
The main rule I can see this breaking is the injunction against not submitting reviews that have been published elsewhere, if the HTML version counts as publishing elsewhere.
That does introduce significant extra complications to keeping it anonymous as well as publication issues, which is a shame. I thought I had seen some Twine embedded on Substack elsewhere but I must have been mistaken. I somehow doubt if the codebase will be updated anytime soon so that idea may have to wait.
My last review included a link to a brief video posted on Vimeo. It was watched quite a few times during period when people were reading reviews, so that worked ok.
Yes - I need to show all entries on Google Docs, and I need to show all finalists on this blog, so anything which is too complicated to work in those places would force me to switch to a different contest format.
Is self-plagiarism frowned upon? For example, I am thinking about publishing an article on my personal substack which draws on arguments outlined in a particular book (though the article itself is not a book review). If I use paragraphs from that article in my book review, would that be unacceptable?
Coincidentally, I have written my views on the ethics of plagiarism if that is a helpful reference.
https://open.substack.com/pub/unboxingpolitics/p/why-is-plagiarism-wrong?r=27wzgp&utm_medium=ios
Seconding this. Can I write a book review for a book that I have already reviewed before because the first one was unsatisfactory?
I don't care about self-plagiarism unless you're famous enough that letting people know who you are would bias the contest.
To what degree is AI allowed in writing the reviews? It would be nice to have that specified in the rules to ensure a level playing field for the submissions.
This can't really be enforced, so we'll have an AI-slop baseline either way. The actual competition is to do better than that, hopefully humanity is still up for the challenge...
"As a large language model, I had zero emotions reading this book. Beep, beep. Just my $0.02, literally."
Unless you're hypothesizing that ACX readers who work at frontier labs will be using secret super-advanced models that no one else knows about, I don't see how there's really much of a "level playing field" issue. In practice, I expect that if a review comes out sounding like AI, preliminary voters will punish it harshly and it won't make the finals. The usual reason to ban AI submissions is for spam control (since it makes it easier to write a review than to read it), but this doesn't seem to have been much of a problem last year and LLMs could already do longform writing then, so maybe Scott just isn't worried about it?
I meant that different authors might use AI differently to different levels of advantage based on what they expect is acceptable for the contest. One author might think that co-writing with AI is totally acceptable so long as it is in their own voice, another might write the whole thing and use AI for iterative feedback to improve the drafts, another might feel it is a zero AI project. I think all could pass the threshold of not sounding like AI, but at some point it might pass what Scott wishes his contest to be.
I agree that spam probably won't be a big issue. I also think that with no commentary from Scott, the default rule is: don't make your AI use detectable enough that voters punish you.
I expect more submissions then before because lower barrier of entry due to AI assistance.
I'd be very reluctant, but if it's just "tidy this up so any grammatical errors, duplications, misspellings and dangling sentences that trail off are corrected", okay.
If it's "here are some notes, write this review for me", hell no.
You may use AI for research and to help you with small writing tasks, but the large majority must be written by you.
Is it allowed to write a a review in a language other than English and use AI to translate it to English?
Can it be for a book with no surviving text, but that can be reconstructed from others’ commentary and the author’s other known works?
Sounds more like a non-traditional review for next year.
The Book of Sand?
Why stop at Borges fanfic when you can review a non-existent book even he hadn't heard of?
I think it was two years ago Scott said it was fine to write a review of a completely imaginary book.
A lot of lost works from the Classical era are only known by mentions in a surviving work, so I say go for it! A review that is an imaginative reconstruction, so long as you do stick to what is known, isn't outside the bounds.
Sure.
A review of the Necronomicon, based on quotes from published fiction, would be highly amusing.
Scott, formatting question. What's the best way in google docs to do footnotes, such that they can easily transfer to Substack? Eg should I write [1] in the body of the review and then list footnote 1 at the end? If I use google docs' built-in footnotes system does that make it really awkward?
In past years he's mentioned not using the built in ones, but maybe something changed.
Yes, please do it manually with [1] etc.
Let's get to it boys 🔥🔥🔥
And women: Start brewing up some coffee for the guys, and check supplies of the massage oil you’ll need for giving them neck and shoulder rubs while they are writing. Some of you may also want to order some flavored lube. 🖕🖕🖕
Let's go!
What counts as a book for review purposes? The category strikes me as somewhat fuzzy. For example: is a webcomic a book? Is a visual novel a book? Et cetera. Previously, when book reviews were the only thing available, my impression was that bookhood was interpreted liberally and those sorts of edge cases would count as books; but with nonbook reviews now also existing I'm a lot less confident about how the edge cases are going to be adjudicated, and accordingly figure I should ask.
couldn't we agree to only share our google docs with *your* (i.e. Scott's) google account rather than to anyone with the link?
There may be a small admin team to help Scott organize the Review Contest.
I'd prefer no, for three reasons:
- I don't want to be spammed with 100 Google emails of "X decided to share this with you"
- My scott@slatestarcodex.com address is sort of a wrapper around my real email address and doesn't always work well with Google Docs. My real email address isn't exactly secret but I probably don't want it on a top level ACX post.
- Sometimes I have an assistant collect the finalists into a final doc and I want them to be able to access them too.
Two questions:
(1) Are we required to provide our real name?
(I assume not, since some past finalists were anonymous, but good to check)
(2) Is an individual allowed to submit more than one entry?
(Also probably not, since this would lead to spam, but better to be clear)
2. No. "Please limit yourself to one entry per person or team."
Thank you, it was careless of me to miss that.
1. No
2. No
Thank you.
For purposes of this contest, may one be both author and reviewer of the book reviewed?
Not you.
But seriously, if this hasn't been decided yet, I would strongly urge Scott to say no. There was a finalist last year that was a bit of an edge case--the AlphaSchool reviewer had some personal connection to the AlphaSchool founders--and it gave many of us gross marketing vibes. Not saying that you, as a giant of modernism, wouldn't be fair to yourself. But if it's known that door is open, then it creates bad incentives.
I would have to reluctantly agree here. Had the AlphaSchool thing not poisoned the well, I'd be open to the experiment, but after that I can't set the precedent of "sell us your own product".
Alpha school was a self review?!? I was under the impression the author was just a parent at the school.
Not a self review, but turned out (so far as I recall) to be someone associated with the school, plus there was controversy over a call (alleged) on the blog or other social media site of founder of school calling people to go vote for the review on here.
The call was not just alleged. It definitely was there on Shitter at the time people began talking about the matter , and it stayed up throughout the period while we discussed it. I checked for it several weeks later and it was still up. And btw the Shitter post did not describe how our contest was set up. It did not ask people to come here, read the finalists, and vote for their favorite 3, adding that in the poster’s view the Alpha School review was best, and suggesting that the poster’s followers would likely agree. It just exhorted readers to come here and vote for the Alpha School review.
He is a parent, but is also a bigshot in organization optimization — consults to big companies. It’s clear from his book and his linked-in that a major area of expertise for him is marketing. When he was asked whether he had been employed by Alpha School he said no, but that he had given them some unpaid assistance with marketing ideas.
Also, since the contest he has not been an ACX subscriber. I know because the guy’s own Substack blog lists the blogs he reads, and we are not on there. So it’s unlikely he entered the contest just as part of participating in the community. Given his probable income, it’s also unlikely he’d have been motivated by the prize money. He can probably make sums that large merely by farting a couple times in some CEO’s office. So only plausible reason for his writing and entering the review was to boost Alpha School
Thanks. I hadn’t followed up after I listened to the review in podcast form.
I would prefer not, sorry.
If you are the ghost of the real Proust I’m for letting you bend or break any rule. Just write for us!
Always something to look forward to. Hopefully the median this year will be more like last year's surprisingly-good showing than 2024's.
Guess I'll wait for next year (or more likely, forget once again), never seems to be enough time for cramming in additional book reading material and some light writing on top of multiple prolific Substacks and web fictions. The best review is the one that gets written at all, so that's the most likely solution of [potential review subjects | materiel already loaded in queue]. If The ACX Commentariat can get a review, surely blogs themselves or particularly meaty posts thereof are also fair game. Like I'm pretty sure someone has attempted The Gervais Principle before...
(I guess it'd be technically within bounds this year to attempt A Map That Reflects The Territory?)
I love these essays. Can’t wait to read them. Good luck, everyone!
The modern man is whipped up into an anxious mess by social media, continually repeating doom and gloom about Trump and middle east wars. Reading books is no simple escape- every modern fiction author lazily shoves in their takes on the same two tired points. I will improve myself and the ACX discourse as a whole by instead reviewing from the classics.
___ moby dick
It came in as a sort of brief interlude and solo between more extensive performances. I take it that this part of the bill must have run something like this:
“Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States. “WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL. “BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN.”
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ah, piss.
Can the review be published elsewhere once the contest is over?
Yes
Is it ok to submit a book review that we already posted elsewhere?
Can it be a comparative review of two books?
Yep! There have even been multiple winners that reviewed multiple books in one review:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-cities-and-the-wealth
(Disputed Nations) https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xexFJ7h0vULMDE7N77q_MIzXoerexfe_CqqGEL6hEoQ/edit#heading=h.qi8yp2d9wbt2
That's great, thank you.
would claude's constitution count as a book?
https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/d0636f72a9493d279ed36b33987da3430bcb5911/claudes-constitution_webPDF_26-02.02a.pdf
"Readers will vote for the ~10 finalists this spring"
Spring has already begun over here, but I guess you mean starting after that due date. 🙂
So am I right to expect a post in late May with links to the submitted (and spamfiltered) Google Docs and instructions how to actually conduct that voting?
I feel like a college student again asking this question:
Does May 20th mean we get until the end of that day? And a particular time zone?
Cheers!
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1. Is there any possibility that a review, if of course selected and published, might include some simple design embellishments such as different fonts or changes to font sizes, as long as these are embedded in the submitted text and are intrinsic to the review?
2. Submit PDF or Word files?
It the book review was already submitted through the Google form, can I make updates to the Google doc until May 20th?
Or will the changes I make after submitting through the Google form not be seen even if they are done before May 20th?
Could the “book” be a series of research papers collected into a volume and published on a preprint server (by the author, not by me)?