Story Matrices

This is an academic text for a field that I'm not in, and thus I was expecting some amount of difficulty getting through. It has taken me many months to read, and it was very helpful that each chapter is quite short, and that the topics discussed were carefully introduced and expanded upon.

However, this desperately needed a better edit than it got. Stray punctuation, repetition of phrases where it didn't make sense (ie. sentences that felt like they'd been half re-written, after part of the idea was moved earlier in the chapter). Polack acknowledges that there were multiple events that interfered with the production of this book, and my guess would be that print deadlines won out over robust editing.

I hope that this will become a show more foundational work on a topic that isn't widely written about, if at all. There are sections where Polack only has their previous work to point at, acknowledging that the scholarship just isn't there. Which must be frustrating as the writer--as it is as the reader--because the value of this kind of work for me is in the dialogue amongst and between the experts, which couldn't happen. show less