How much education are you really gonna want to be responsible for when Joe or Susie Public opens your book and settles down to read?

As so often, my post today is inspired by disappointment, this time in reading a unexpectedly low-brow book after gulping down three terrific ones.

The terrific books: Simon Winder’s 3 excellent ruminations on European History: Lotharingia, Danubia, Germania. (I recommend that order).

My weak spot in general knowledge is History. I’ve filled in a lot of it since gagging in grade school, especially in specialized areas such as linguistics, evolution, migration, geography, cultural impacts, etc., but I never had that fascination that, say, military enthusiasts often exhibit — I care more about the ins and outs of historic mythology transmission or cultural exchanges than the actual conquests on the ground. That said, if you read as much as omnivorously as I do, you can’t avoid filling in enough of the blanks to make up for early educational failures.

It’s not easy to tell coherent stories about the intertwining of civilizations and the ways in which they collided or influenced each other. On the other hand, History is certainly full of interesting things. But you can’t just jump into the pool most of the time — you need to know what happened before the event of interest, and why things worked out the way they did, and for that to work, you need to know a lot of preliminary information. The three books by Winder are at just the right level (for me) — they assume an adequate if undetailed general knowledge of his subjects, with an idiosyncratic fascination for the coincidences and unpredictable occurrences that actually moved the historic consequences along. I find that the things that fascinate him fascinate me, too, so I appreciate the guided tour he offers and value his judgments.

The disappointing book: a history of Alfred the Great. No point naming the author — that’s not the issue. The problem with the book is a very common one in non-fiction like history — an inability to balance a reasonable version of “what everybody knows (maybe even sub-adults)” with the clues for “the oddities I’ll tell you about” without boring the reader to tears with the “well, duh” response to deplorable and obvious unnecessary (and repeated, and error prone) side remarks (an editor in the subject being regrettably missing). Think of the sort of book that presents itself for sale when you get off the tour bus to visit an historic sight (say, the Uffington White Horse), a famous location associated with Alfred. I happen to know the tribal movements of the surrounding periods and the context of the older mythology and prehistory and archaeology, etc., but while I realize a book focused on an historical personage has to provide at least a little explanation about these sorts of things, I expect better fleshed-out detail and at least defensible accuracy). Seems like the temptation for this author is to either over or (especially) under-explain the ancillary background of these sorts of bits in ways that remind me of grade school texts — filled with random educational tidbits for the benefit of the uneducated reader without any useful context to build upon, and typically not really accurate either, without making clear what they’ve gotten wrong (though the naive would do well to suspect).

So… how to avoid this sort of thing, as a writer? How much can you count upon being adequately general knowledge for your readers? The “everybody knows” quotient is rather unpredicatible and varies strongly by target age and specialized education. As fiction writers, we understand how to clue a reader in to a new term or alien definition or cultural artefact… but that’s limited to the world of the book itself, which we control. When you approach non-fiction, the assumption of knowledge on the part of the reader is easy to get wrong (at least I am frequently disappointed by either too little, too much, or too weak (e.g., wrong or at best unsophisticated) settings and explanations. Falsus in uno lurks for the unwary author who doesn’t get it right, or at least, plausible.

The Simon Winder books were delightful — they get it just right, reveling in the “as you know” jokes in the history he recounts which stand repeating and analysis, and rewarding the reader with the crosslinks and causations that may have escaped the reader’s prior knowledge, to his improved delight.

How do you treat “assumed reader knowledge” in fiction and non-fiction differently? Or do you, as reader or writer?