Quote:
Originally Posted by DiapDealer
I really don't get why people think " could be read alone" is somehow synonymous with " should (or was intended to) be read alone!" Or that "could be read alone" is even in any way objectively defined for all readers. 
No two readers' coulds are the same. So such a statement is fairly unhelpful. |
I hope I haven't given the impression that I equate "
should be read alone" with anything else. But I do think it is possible - for many (most?) books - to objectively say that they were "intended to be able to be read alone" (a bit of a mouthful but you need to whole thing to see what I'm getting at).
Take Pratchett's Discworld novels as an example. There have been lengthy arguments here about what order they should be read in (that we don't need to repeat), but it is apparent that Pratchett intended that it would be
possible for someone to just pick up any one of these novels and read it, without having read anything else. (At the start of
Lords and Ladies he adds a note starting "By and large, most Discworld books have stood by themselves, as complete books." and then proceeds to tell you what you need to know so this book, too,
could be read on its own.)
Pratchett wasn't trying to tell anyone that they
should read them alone, only that they
could read them alone.
And this is largely my point: "stand-alone" and "self-contained" both indicate that a book
could be read alone. How is that not objective? It in no way tries to tell people who prefer some other other reading order that they must obey the directive, it only tells them that it
could be this way ... if that's okay with them.
Those of us that prefer to read books in some particular order (for me it's publication order), will do additional research. Like you, I would prefer to know if a book is totally unrelated to anything else the author has written, but I'm never going to accept another person's "stand-alone" description as meaning that, they will have to be more explicit.