“The next book he wrote, Noise, ….” Would have been better or “After that book he wrote Noise….”.
I absolutely was confused for a second or two and thought “wait, are we talking about a different person? He isn’t going to have a ‘next’ book unless he had one queued up?”.
Did I need the explanation above? Not really, I’d come to the right conclusion on my own but I can imagine someone who isn’t a native speaker (reader?) might stumble on that more and I enjoyed the confirmation.
This is overconfidence; e.g. it "it is clear to me, so it must have been clear to everyone else."
Indeed, there is a person in this overall thread [1] saying the use of "next" was ambiguous:
> I literally thought some unpublished book.
It was made clear to everyone because of the word choice in context. If someone didn't get it then they didn't put two and two together.
I looked up the word in a few different dictionaries and the top entry aligns more with "subsequent" in every one.
You are wrong on this.
First, I hope you recognize there are other entries other than the first. Multiple entries means there are multiple usages. There can be ambiguity.
In the case of the Apple Dictionary, here is the first:
> 1 (of a time or season) coming immediately after the time of writing or speaking: we'll go next year | next week's parade.
> I looked up the word in a few different dictionaries and the top entry aligns more with "subsequent" in every one.
Wow. You are claiming this resolves ambiguity in general?
You are not the arbiter of what is ambiguous for others. I suggest you should be curious about what makes this ambiguous or confusing rather than post-hoc defining some standard by which things are not ambigous.
>> there is a person in this overall thread ... saying the use of "next" was ambiguous
> Ok, fine, probably someone will get confused about anything.
You exaggerated and trivialized. You deflected and moved the goalposts. These are signs you want to win more than discuss in good faith.
Probably nobody at all got confused by that word choice.