You don’t want to read this book.

I’m only bothering to write about it because it’s been on the best seller list for months.

Books are not like music, you don’t get to experience it before you buy it, so with the accolades and sales many people are purchasing this book, and I won’t say as few are completing it as Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time,” but I think most people never make it to the end.

The bottom line is first and foremost a book must be readable. Information is not enough, you must have a narrative, you must pull the reader in. But “1929” is a pastiche of facts, of research, it reads like a college thesis, and you know how many people read those when they’re done…ZERO!

I’ve got no problem with Andrew Ross Sorkin. Then again, when you spread yourself this thin… Ryan Seacrest might be doing many things, but he’s got as much gravitas as a box of Cheerios. It’s mindless. Whereas Sorkin is on CNBC, helped create “Billions” and is a writer for the “New York Times.” As for taking the time to write a book? When? With not only these gigs, but three children to boot!

So you’re scratching your head saying he writes for the “New York Times,” how bad can he be?

Well newspaper writing is different from book writing. Newspaper writing is about information laid out clearly and concisely. Furthermore, in a paper like the “Times,” opinion is relegated to a different page, so there’s no attitude, no real perspective, just the facts.

If you want someone to take the time to read a book…

The dirty little secret is most books don’t sell. Maybe a couple of thousand copies at best. And in a country of 300+ million, that’s bupkes. But we’re subjected to hype about these tomes for months, and reviews and… Kara Swisher talked about her lame book for months, as if anybody cared, and it came out and face-planted…it wasn’t good, I tried to read it. But she gets a pass from the others in the information industrial complex.

As for the book business… If you want to talk about people with a lot of self-respect, it’s not down and dirty like the music business. And those who work in it hate that lowbrow stuff is keeping the lights on.

So “1929” was billed as a deep dive into the crash, with lessons for today.

Well, at first I could see the parallels, but those died pretty quickly. It was a different time with different regulations, or lack thereof. Are there still crooks in finance? Yes, but they’re not really doing it the same way. (Although you did see that Jamie Dimon made $770 million last year…and this is heinous, no one deserves that much, especially when people are hurting, having a tough time making ends meet, never mind getting health care.)

What I wanted was drama. What it felt like when the market actually crashed. And at that point, Sorkin is writing about the market day by day, I’m waiting for the shoe to drop, but it never does narratively, you feel like the market went down and then down further and…whatever is happening on Wall Street is detached from the rest of the country in “1929.”

At the end of this book, Sorkin thanks Erik Larson for advice. I’ve read all the Larson books, the best one is still the one I read first, “Devil in the White City.” But as good a researcher as Larson is, and decent with narrative too, his books are flat, there’s no arc, just endless information. As for Sorkin’s “1929,” it’s a pale imitation of Larson.

Only when you get to the end of the book does Sorkin say he wanted to flesh out the personalities. Well, the focus of the book kept on switching from the people to the market and…you can’t do everything, focus on one or the other, or write about one person, or the crash itself, a secret of writing is you sometimes have to leave the best stuff out, because it doesn’t fit with the narrative. But Sorkin throws in the words of a preacher from Massachusetts at the end…someone without profile who had no connection with the players, why?

Because Sorkin was determined to see all his research in print.

The most amazing thing, the true lesson for me, was that so many of these people ended up broke, they were gamblers, they never saved for a rainy day. And most of their names have been forgotten. And you will read a bit about the individuals, but you’ll tell yourself there’s got to be a better book about this out there, and I’m sure there is, probably one of those Sorkin credits as a jumping off point.

Writing is hard. And I’ll also say, writers are born, not made. As a matter of fact, the more you teach someone how to write the more you risk squeezing the creativity out of them. We don’t need me-too, we need unique.

So I finished this book, even though at times my eyes glazed over and I had to reread passages, but not only was it disappointing, I just couldn’t get over the fact that this was the book everybody was hailing, everybody was talking about, that was selling.

It doesn’t deserve it.