The NYT Book Review has another one of those covers, this week, where it gives you the very beginnings of three different reviews of three different nonfiction books all more or less on the same subject. Let’s look at the three first sentences:

A great deal of modern popular culture — including just about everything pertaining to what French savants like to call le nouvel âge d’or de la comédie américaine — runs on the disavowal of maturity.

When did the central aim of parenting become preparing children for success?

The notion that adulthood, despite its perks, is little more than a booby prize for surviving the scrapes and trials of youth has more or less become a cultural given in the modern age.

All three reviewers, in other words, have decided independently to follow the same (tired) general format: you pretty much know how all three of these reviews are going to read, just based on their first sentences.

This style is making its way even into fiction book reviews. Here’s another first sentence from this week:

If only for the outsize cultural imprint left by “The Hunger Games,” it is reasonable to argue that young adult fiction has done a far more aggressive job grappling with social inequality than much of what is rendered today in the name of literary fiction, a world where poor and ­working-class characters are so often visible merely at the periphery, if they are visible at all.

Precious few NYT blog posts or news-analysis stories are written in this manner, for a host of good reasons. Is there a single good reason to slap a phrase like “le nouvel âge d’or de la comédie américaine” on the front cover of a Sunday newspaper section, especially when it’s entirely gratuitous? Why run with first sentences which need to be read very slowly, or multiple times, just to understand what they’re saying?

Here’s an idea: Why not try to print reviews which people are likely to actually enjoy reading? We ask that of our books, it’s about time we applied the same standard to our book reviews, too.