On Hatereading as Method

Ridicule is our last, best weapon

I wasn’t going to read Olivia Nuzzi’s new book, American Canto. It isn’t, strictly speaking, in my wheelhouse. But I had some time available between the end of classes and final exam submission. And I do love a good hateread.

My standard approach is to create a reaction thread on Bluesky, and treat that as the first draft of a proper book review. Then I trim it down and turn it into a book review that resides on Substack.

I don’t see any point in turning the Nuzzi review into a substack post though. There have already been plenty of sharp-witted review, appropriately cataloguing the book’s failings. I don’t have much to add beyond the hyperlinks. (My review thread starts here, for my non-bluesky-addicted readers).

Instead, I’d like to take a step back and discuss hatereading as a genre. Because I’m clearly enjoying myself with this, but I’ve never paused to think through what it is exactly that I’m doing here.

This is the eighth hateread-thread that I’ve composed this year. It has become something of a running bit. (A couple people referred to me this week as “Bluesky’s Omelas child” and ohmygodIlovethat.)

The other books I reviewed were (1) Future Shock, (2) The Network State (far and away the worst book I’ve ever read) (3), Abundance (Which I didn’t actually hate, mind you), (4) After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People, (5) Boom: Bubbles and Stagnation, (6) If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. I also wrote a thread about Alex Karp’s The Technological Republic, but I didn’t post a link to Substack and can’t track it down now.

What I look for in a hateread candidate is something that deserves it. The book has to have some juice. Most of these books come from Silicon Valley intellectuals, or from leading thinkers that Silicon Valley takes seriously. All of them tell us something about the stories that power elites tell each other. That’s the main quality I look for in a hateread candidate: It has to punch upward.

The other thing I look for is ideas that I don’t yet fully understand. I read Abundance and After the Spike with a hunch that I would disagree with the authors. But I didn’t know in what ways I would disagree with them. The livethreads aren’t just entertainment for the Bluesky sickos. They’re also the way I work out my own critical analysis.

I do like to pick books that deserve a bit of ridicule. I am, both by education and predisposition, an Alinskyite. Alinsky tells us that ridicule is our most potent weapon when confronting the powerful. In the present day, when the tech billionaires decide to compete in the marketplace of ideas by just buying the whole market outright, it sometimes seems like ridicule is the last, best weapon left at our disposal.

So the idea, simply put, is to read what they actually say, take it seriously, and poke fun at all the ways it makes no sense at all.

What I like most about the livetweet format is the ability to take screenshots/photos of individual paragraphs to show people what I’m reacting to. A proper book review is, by necessity, a distillation. It is shorter than the review thread, and includes only a select few quotes from the text. The review threads are sheer chaos by comparison. It has the energy of an unhinged book club, “look at this paragraph. I need to shout about this bullshit!”

My 2024 review of Nate Silver’s book, On The Edge is a good example. The review thread spanned 83 posts, over 3,600 words, 18 screenshots, and a handful of reaction gifs. That’s absurd. The proper book review was just under 1,900 words. That’s long, for a book review, but still much tighter and less shout-y.

As a writer, the livetweet threads are both more fun to write and less work to produce than a real review. In the Nuzzi thread, for instance, passages from the book basically function as setups, freeing me to just fiddle with the punchline.

The threads also free me up to write about tangential points that don’t merit inclusion in a book review. Olivia Nuzzi’s depiction of DC, for instance, annoyed the ever-loving crap out of me. Nuzzi equates the city of Washington, DC with the seven-block radius surrounding her Georgetown condo. That was so goddamn annoying, but it wasn’t one of the essential problems with the book. In a review thread, I’m free to share a paragraph, shout my immediate reaction, and then keep moving. In a book review, that point would inevitably be cut. I like that freedom, and the social permission to engage in tangential riffs.

One thing I want to make clear: it isn’t as though I solely read books that I dislike. I have read 132 books so far this year. It’s about 50/50 fiction/nonfiction. The three books that I read prior to American Canto were Laura K. Fields’s Furious Minds (Excellent), Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (a classic) and Antonia Hodgsen’s The Raven Scholar (possibly the best fantasy book I read this year). I intend to write an end-of-year post, highlighting some of the best books I read this year. The books-I-won’t-like only constitute 5-10% of my overall literary diet.

I’ve attempted to write livetweet-review threads of good books. The threads sputter out quickly, though. A good review thread has the feel of a good rant or a roast. It’s Mystery Science Theater 3000, but for books and through shortform text bursts. Stretching the genre to say “this passage is so well-crafted. I’ve been wrestling with this point, and the author really nails it” just doesn’t lend itself to long diatribes.

One of my personal resolutions for 2026 is to write more positive book reviews. They won’t begin as bluesky threads, but they’ll end up on Substack or in some more reputable publishing outlet.

But I’m also going to keep hatereading in 2026. Around 10% of the books I read will be candidates for long, sarcastic bluesky rants. And that will partially be because, hell, I enjoy it. But it’s also because I think there’s substantive value in taking seriously what the powerful say in public, and in pointing out their absurdities.