Last chapters of books

Nonfiction books degrade quickly towards the end. Usually it's because the books are made longer to "make them book length".

I remember submitting an article for publication a decade ago. The sub-editor presently replied, saying “it is all very good, but one problem is that you’ve only written about 800 words. We like to publish 900-950 word articles. Can you add one paragraph in the end?”

I remember being completely thrown off by this request. The way I usually write (including blogposts) is that I get into some kind of a zone, and then start hammering away, until the article has been written. My wife and daughter have been trained so that whenever I say I’m “writing” they know to leave me alone. My son will be trained similarly shortly.

I think I spent more time writing that one last paragraph of that article that I had writing the rest of it. The problem was that I had to not only figure out what to write there, it also had to match the tone and flow of the rest of the article that I had written (and which I wasn’t willing to edit).

A similar thing happened a couple of years later when I was writing my book. It had been sent for review to a number of referees, and after a few of them, I got the feedback that I needed to add another chapter.

“Your book is about platforms and market design, and we have seen a very interesting experiment in platforms in the last year, with the Indian government introducing the UPI. Some commentary about that will add to your book”, I was told.

Perversely enough, adding a chapter to a book was actually easier than adding a paragraph to an article. So writing it was not the problem. Looking back, though, while the chapter was relevant to the book overall, that I was commenting on a fresh piece of technology / policy whose effects hadn’t really played out meant that I was putting in half-baked analysis into the book. Moreover, because I wrote this chapter at the very end, several months after the rest of this book had been written, I possibly hurried through it (and it didn’t receive the editorial oversight that the rest of the book did). And so, with full benefit of hindsight, this last chapter possibly sticks out like a sore thumb - if my readers got to it, that is!

And now, thinking about this, my experience with my own book explains a lot of other books I read - the last chapter is simply substandard compared to the rest of the book. Rather, non-fiction books start falling away about two or three chapters near the end.

There is this genre of movies that I absolutely hate, which includes the likes of U-Turn, Super Deluxe, Striptease and Jigarthanda - where the premise gets nicely set up for most of the movie, and then there is something absolutely random that happens that turns the rest of the movie into a farce (all these movies are old enough for me to spoil here). As a viewer, I start feeling massively let down, as if all the investment I had made into the movie until then was suddenly blown up.

A lot of non-fiction books have a similar effect.

The farce may not be at the same level in the non-fiction books, but if you were to compare the quality of the last few chapters to what came before in the book, it is simply an absolute letdown.

First of all a lot of non-fiction books are much longer than they need to be. They don’t have the same density of insight that you can expect from blog posts or even long-form articles. This also has to do with the focal point - the market simply doesn’t exist for stuff of a certain intermediate length - it either needs to be short enough to be an article or long enough to be a book, and people add empty words to turn books into the latter.

In any case, because books are much longer than they need to be, by the time you are coming towards the end of it, you want to be done with it. You want to come to that last page on the Kindle where you rate the book on Goodreads. And you feel too guilty to abandon the book, and so you soldier on. And at this point, if the book disappoints, you feel massively let down.

I just finished reading this book called Double Entry, which is a history of the double entry accounting system. The first half of the book is pretty good, giving a historical context on how the double entry system as we know it came to be, and the various factors in medieval Europe that led to the development of this system.

Then somewhere in the middle, the book starts going down, getting into things like the GDP (which has nothing to do with the double entry system, if you think of it - government accounts are pure cash accounts), which is the first sign that the book didn’t deserve to be as long as it is.

And then the book goes completely unhinged - the last couple of chapters are about how the current corporate accounting system, and national accounting system, don’t care about the environment. In IIMB, we used to have this phrase called “H!ASKB”, which stood for “hmmpf! arbit sa kuchch bhi”. If you think about it, the connection of environmental concerns to the original premise of the book (a history of the double entry accounting system) is far fetched at best. And then when you see so much of the book being devoted to this topic, you seriously start questioning the author’s priorities!

Though, thinking about it now, I don’t know if it’s the author’s priorities or the editor’s! For all you know, the book was originally shorter, sticking to the point of the history of the double entry accounting system.

And then the editors might have felt that the book is too short and things need to be added. National accounting would have got added first, however tenuous that is to the main topic of the book. The book would’ve still been a few pages short.

That’s when an editor would have got a brainwave of connecting the book to current issues - why not talk about the environment as well? This would have also served the purpose of “talking about both sides of the issue” (accounting being an “evil capitalist” topic). Maybe the book might have gone for a “sensitivity review” as well for good measure, where the feedback might have been that it’s “too capitalist” and the environmental stuff added on to hedge against that.

In any case, it would have been far better as a 150 page book purely on the double entry accounting system, rather than a 250 page book on life, the universe and everything else.

Don’t bother reading it.