> Part of why I dislike essay collections is their neverendingness; I’ll read two, three, four essays in a volume and I still can’t cross it off my list. An incomplete task, it becomes a mental weight, an obligation. I’m deprived of the satisfaction of finishing.
Not being able to close a book without reading everything in it is a problem. People need to get over this, it's compulsive behavior. You don't have to read all the essays, just close the book, nobody's keeping score.
Natsume Soseki once said that reading every book from cover to cover is like marrying every girl you fall in love with. I think it was in the book Kusamakura.
A physicist friend of mine changed my life by simply saying that the reader is under no obligation to or has a contract with the author that he needs to read everything the author wrote. I cam across the more poetic Soseki later.
I've loved kindle samples for this reason. (Although all samples are not the same length) If I get to the end of the sample (which may take an hour to read? - longer than bookstore browsing time) and have enough reasons to continue I'll buy the book.
I've recently run into the opposite problem -I have 20 samples I'd like to finish and 6-8 books I put down that I want to pick back up. I'm starting to lose track.
Also as an aside, kindle library organization UI is really terrible.
Maybe that urge (or need for the satisfaction) stems from having paid for a book or keeping a list of "read" books etc., But it's not worth the time and effort. If you find a book uninteresting, just close it and move on. If you linger on it later you can always return to it.
Some open-world video games are very long to finish, but they have a primary story/quest that's not too hard to complete, so it doesn't feel bad to stop there. Time is important, watching a series instead of a film is rarely worth it.
Technical books have whole sections you can easily skip until the day you may need it.
Non-fiction can be read faster when it's explained in details.
I guess fiction big books are the ones you have to read entirely to be satisfied.
The books that I feel compelled to finish are those for our neighborhood book club. The household that picks furnishes dinner, so I feel that there is a contract there. (Not every one does. "Well, I've been really busy, and I listened to most of it.") This has led me to finish a few rotten books that I'd never have gone past page 20 on if I had encountered them at a beach house.
But you raise an interesting point. I really like The Hall of Uselessness by Simon Leys, but have I read every essay in it? I think so, but am not sure.
I understand for a novel or something. But for an essay, not finishing it is sometimes not finishing the argument and therefore not understanding the point at all.
I guess the article's point is that an essay is presenting one idea in the smallest amount of sentences possible. Imagine you do that and get an essay with 100 pages. It means that 90 pages is not enough to understand the idea. Now, imagine I uselessly triple the number of pages by repeating each sentence in 3 different ways. In this case, if I just read the first 100 pages and stop, I did not understood the idea, and reading these 100 pages was at best useless (the situation is the same as if I did not know the idea at all) or more realistic counter-productive (I have badly understood the idea).
As for one 100-page essay, you should definitely be able to understand the idea within 90 pages (hopefully 10 pages). The author might need 100 pages to close off all major counterarguments, cite precedence, explore some second-order tradeoffs, underscore the importance of their argument using evidence, and lay the groundwork for future areas of investigation.
We could say "just cut out that stuff" but that weakens the essay and makes it shallow. Instead, it's uo to the reader to skip it if they don't have time or interest. But then they should also hold off on dismissing it based on counterarguments for which they declined to read the provided rebuttals.
if im reading a big sci-fi anthrology, i just search for key-terms that interest me and read the stories that contain them (eg, robot, colony,planet etc)
Nowadays, reading is mostly a meditative exercise for me. I'm not an "infovore" so I don't care about the velocity of ideas entering my head. Otherwise why not just go on Blinkist and read (or better yet listen to) book summaries. I also get the sense that the 300-page book that takes a week to read probably sinks into my brain better than a 100-pager; perhaps for the simple fact that the 300-pager takes longer to finish so I wrestle with the ideas for longer.
That being said, I do appreciate concisely written books. I wonder if our preference for shorter, more succinct writings is an inevitable outcome of the information age. So much data enter our eyeballs every day. Maybe we just have less tolerance for "fluff" compared to our ancestors. Older writings tend to be much "wordier". One example that comes to mind is the Einstein quote about simplicity from 1933: "It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience". I prefer the condensed version: "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler".
Yes! I have a completely unfounded theory that sounds right to my gut that basically all that matters is time and focus. If you want to learn something all you need is time and focus, you can't get there with just one of those two, you need both.
The night before an exam, I can focus really hard and get a bunch of info crammed into my head, but it's all gone a week later. I haven't tried Blinkist but I struggle to imagine how it's any different.
A long books beauty is the path one takes to get to the conclusion the auther arrived at (over a much larger period of time themselves!), the debate, the details, the story, that's where the real "lessons" are. You can't just rip a page out of here and there, read them and call it a day. I mean you can, you just need to be honest with yourself in terms of what you're really doing.
There are no shortcuts to learning, you are always trading something away.
> Attention economics is an approach to the management of information that treats human attention as a scarce commodity and applies economic theory to solve various information management problems.
I think this author is talking about a subset of non-fiction books, and we may as well call them "non-fiction idea" books, where the writer has a single idea they want to convince you of. On Tyranny does that. And sure, maybe books like Checklist Manifesto and The Goal could have been reduced to a hundred tight pages.
The hundred page idea definitely doesn't apply to non-fiction in general though. I can't imagine a history book or a biography covering what they need in a hundred pages. I don't think Chip War could be reduced.
> And sure, maybe books like Checklist Manifesto and The Goal could have been reduced to a hundred tight pages.
The Checklist Manifesto came from a New Yorker article. The article was perfect, the book is repetitive and full of stuff (building plans for a office tower are a checklist — sure, and at that point the word has lost all its meaning).
Read the article! Really, it‘s great. Skip the book.
And the book is rather thin already, not some 600 pager.
I have written four books in the 60-80 thousand word range and one (a commission) where I had a constraint of 30 thousand words or 100 pages. I know it’s a cliché, but guess which one took me the longest.
I've been leaning in this direction for several years, now. Longer books generally are a) trying to do too many things at once, or b) demonstrate that the author doesn't understand their topic very well, or c) are filled with padding, usually as some form of Social Proof or similar, with irrelevant "case studies" or 500 irrelevant footnotes/references so on.
Quite similar with 2 hour long "podcasts". There's little to no respect for the subject, the audience, or the "author" on display in most of these. Exceptions tending to prove the "rule".
I find PhD dissertations to be a good fit for this. They are usually required to provide background on the field, an argument for why the covered research is state of the art and some actual example of original research. 80-200 pages depending on the field.
There are two types of good books: short ones, and longer ones with indicies and summaries after each chapter. Then there is the other 95%. Or is it 99%?
Its hard to write a good book. That makes them so valuable.
For most self help / productivity books, I agree pretty strongly with this take. A lot of those types of books (Atomic Habits, Getting Things Done, Measure What Matters as some examples) often feel like they could have been reduced to a blog post, or series of blog posts at most. They were good books, but I did feel like there there was some padding to slog through in each chapter.
Usually, the point is communicated fairly quickly a few paragraphs into the chapter and then belaboured for pages with one or two anecdotes that don’t lend much more weight to the strength/validity of the point for me.
I've spent a lot of my life practicing the 300-word idea, so the 100-page idea seems pretty sensible. When I think of the 500-page+ books I've read, the intent of every one of them was to create separation and distance from something conventional or to pull apart a lot of different ideas to make room for their new one. Others are to create a set of exhaustive variations to show it the core idea is generally applicable or somehow essential.
A lot of it is discourse to preempt critics, where history shows almost universally that this is time wasted.
My apologies if I’m missing the sarcasm — is this a joke? Sure there’s a stereotype of young founders, but where on earth did you hear that they prefer _actual teenagers_?
I think a lot of comments are missing the point : it’s not about page size.
Today, most book writers are following a template of about 300-pages imposed by their editor, this (non justified) rule sold as a sweet spot is being (blindly?) applied by most authors and seems to be producing books that are unfocused.
What should be understood from the blog article is not that 100-pages books are inherently better, but that books should be written in a more focused way, without the unnecessary ceremony/anecdotes mostly added for the sole purpose of filling the void necessary to reach the « imposed » 300 pages recommendation.
It varies by book genre, but there are clearly page number requirements for each sub genre.
A history book will not be best selling if its not a giant doorstop of a book. A narrative non-fiction book will be shorter and snappier because different expectations hold.
A fantasy book should be a tome, etc etc.
For non-fiction, editors very much do enforce these limits. A short history book won't be taken seriously, unless its repackaged as a different type of book.
I am disappointed. I thought this was about an individual elucidating their own ideas across one hundred pages in a rough manuscript.
As far as books go, give me the 300 pagers. Inundate me. I’m ready. It’s time.
The internet has betrayed my intellect. 300 pages. Inundate me. I want to read the 300 pager that expands upon the 100-page idea. Inundate me. I’m ready. I’ve had it with the screen. Unless it can point me to the next time.
Nothing else will satisfy me. It’s apparent. I thirst inundation. Bring me the tome.
I understand that you’re trying to be poetic, and I can appreciate both the goal and the underlying sentiment, I just don’t think the linguistic construction works.
I am amused by the business authors who give away their book for free online, and then charge money for the shorter executive summary. $$$ Me, I've read Webster's 3rd cover to cover.
> On one hand anyone well traveled in life can see 200-300+ page non-fiction books are padded heavily
One of my peeves is than an otherwise good story has to be contorted to fit the conventions of the medium. So many books would be an excellent 80 pages, but are many times longer.
An interesting experience I had was deciding to enter my novel into a contest, and discovering the contest had strict requirements on how long each chapter had to be. They could have set a total word count requirement but instead they wanted X chapters of Y-Z total words.
It was interesting to re-edit my novel to fit this format because in some cases, it created this awful impetus to 'pad out' key moments or the flow of the plot in order to hit the Y mark, and in other cases I had 'too much' and might need to cut an interesting moment short or trivialize what someone was saying to fit it all into a 'chapter'.
Where before, I had just written more or less how much I thought needed to be on the page, which meant I had some chapters that were 500 words long and some that were 2000 words long.
In the end I think it improved the work in a few places just through the process of being edited again (for the 10th or 11th time - try writing a novel sometime, that part is fun, editing it all over and over is the hard part), but overall having new conventions enforced on it was just a lot of busywork, and the work breathed much better when allowed to be concise at the right moments and verbose at others.
A good lesson for me in terms of 'not all constraints are useful ones', since I'm used to thinking of constraints as something that enables creativity and productivity.
That's quite interesting. In the Red Rising series (a somewhat pulpy future dystopian story) chapter length is used in an entertaining way in one of the books. This is one of those POV character series, and one chapter has a long description of one character's struggles to get to a certain place so that they can ambush another, the resulting ambush, a somewhat detailed description of how he struggles to keep his life, and how that relates to the rest of his objectives. The next chapter is one paragraph from the protagonist of the series - an ubermensch-type fellow that is a journal log or something that goes "Encountered light resistance at $ambush_site". Pretty successful show don't tell there of the skill/strength disparity. The next chapter goes to a different POV. I enjoyed that clever trick with the chapter lengths.
Why would an author complain that the average 12 books read by an average American a year is likely a combination of those who read nothing after high school and those that read vicariously yet not seek out a source, simply let an unverified, unsourced, unreferenced thing sit there.
It seems that reading 100 pages a day does not guarantee development of critical skills.
> Did they read Matthew Walther's The One Hundred Pages Strategy and not understand it?
Maybe. I can't remember if that was linked from something else I read or was that something else in its entirety. Maybe the comments skewed toward the writing instead. Because, for whatever reason, I came away feeling the same and this article felt like it was addressing something I had recently read here on HN.
kind reminder that timothy snyder isn’t held in great regard by other historians, even by right-wing ones—so, basically his own camp. especially on methodological grounds, omer bartov and richard evans have called out his use of chronological juxtaposition, saying it implies connections between events without enough evidence. this, along with other critiques, makes it an entertaining hundred page maybe, but not great value.
(Speaking of right-wing historians, does anyone have thoughts on Richard Pipes? Specifically his book on the Russian Revolution. I found it fascinating, but it has been criticized, and I'm not sure how much credence to give the critiques.)
While we’re on the subject of reading advice, here’s mine. If I really want to learn something, like the history of the Russian Revolution, I have to read it three times. So, I’d read Pipes, then read Antony Beevor, then read China Mieville, then triangulate. Pick any three authors. Pipes was definitely conservative, but there is no such thing as completely objective history, especially on a topic like the Russian Revolution (arguably the most political event since the French Revolution)
I actually read Fitzpatrick's book on the Russian Revolution first. Her view was a lot different from that of Pipes, and I didn't feel well-positioned to adjudicate.
That's where my issue comes from. I don't think reading a 3rd book would solve it.
Pipes' account resonated better with my view of human nature, but maybe that's just my bias creeping in ;-)
Maybe the trick is to initially focus on well-studied areas of history where there is very little controversy, to calibrate your BS detector. Then once you're calibrated, you can be more judicious learning about the controversial stuff.
Thoughts on that strategy? If it seems good, I'd love to get some recs on specific "authoritative" history books which could be good for calibration purposes :-)
That's basically my strategy: try to start with more factual accounts. Sometimes, I start with the shorter accounts. Then move to the more opinionated or specific histories. It all depends on how closely you want to study a particular topic.
I'm just saying I don't feel like I know even the basic facts until I've seen them at least three times.
I don't have any other specific "authoritative" books to recommend. Maybe one of the Lenin or Stalin biographies? And Dr. Zhivago, of course...
BTW, Pipes was so hard on Lenin that he made me start thinking perhaps communism might've actually worked* if it wasn't for that Lenin guy.
* by "worked", I mean evolved into something more functional, benevolent, and incentives-aligned, perhaps akin to Nordic social democracy, or perhaps something novel
You're on to one of the biggest controversies of all: were all the big things that happened (an almost infinite list of almost infinite badness) due to Stalin, or was it Lenin, or did it all go bad starting with Marx? Or the French Revolution? Much ink and much blood spilled over those questions. Animal Farm touches on it (Orwell was a socialist but hated Stalin). Solzhenitsyn came to the opposite conclusion: that the Gulag and the purges started with Lenin. I don't think it will ever be settled.
yeah, Snyder is right-wing: "Snyder’s “century of blood,” with its “twinned totalitarianisms,” has become a new “common-sense,” liberal talking point — “Nolte with an NPR tote bag,” as a colleague put it. His Bloodlands is just a more sophisticated rendering of suggestive correlation between Nazism and the Soviet Union, legitimizing formerly fringe-nationalist dogmatic talking points, while hiding behind extremely problematic chains of citation. He has proved repeatedly willing to connect Nazi atrocities to Soviet crimes. Even Wehrmacht-veteran historians like Joachim Fest, who minimized the Holocaust, made clear that it was Hitler, not Stalin, who was “devoid of any civilizing ideas.” https://jacobin.com/2023/01/soviet-union-memorials-nazi-germ...
Snyder has been defined as “Nolte with an NPR tote bag”
The difference between you and I is that when I encounter a blunt, ad hominem smear like this (noticed the unsourced formulation "A colleague says ...", in the same way that Trump says things like "People say she's a Marxist" to cheering crowds), I tend to go, "Okay, another vitriolic rant. Am I going to have time to finish ploughing through this? Probably not."
Whereas your gut take seems to be some form of: "Yesss! Score one for the team! Where can I get more of this stuff?"
The article is full of other raw insinuations, and plainly broken argumentation that should be jumping out at you.
But go ahead, read whatever you want, and import whichever memes you want.
> Part of why I dislike essay collections is their neverendingness; I’ll read two, three, four essays in a volume and I still can’t cross it off my list. An incomplete task, it becomes a mental weight, an obligation. I’m deprived of the satisfaction of finishing.
Not being able to close a book without reading everything in it is a problem. People need to get over this, it's compulsive behavior. You don't have to read all the essays, just close the book, nobody's keeping score.
Natsume Soseki once said that reading every book from cover to cover is like marrying every girl you fall in love with. I think it was in the book Kusamakura.
A physicist friend of mine changed my life by simply saying that the reader is under no obligation to or has a contract with the author that he needs to read everything the author wrote. I cam across the more poetic Soseki later.
Likewise, Borges said (paraphrasing) "if you're not enjoying a book after a while, just put it down - it wasn't written for you".
I've loved kindle samples for this reason. (Although all samples are not the same length) If I get to the end of the sample (which may take an hour to read? - longer than bookstore browsing time) and have enough reasons to continue I'll buy the book.
I've recently run into the opposite problem -I have 20 samples I'd like to finish and 6-8 books I put down that I want to pick back up. I'm starting to lose track.
Also as an aside, kindle library organization UI is really terrible.
100% agreed.
Maybe that urge (or need for the satisfaction) stems from having paid for a book or keeping a list of "read" books etc., But it's not worth the time and effort. If you find a book uninteresting, just close it and move on. If you linger on it later you can always return to it.
Just noting that this narrative in the post is contrary to the author's own guidelines - where they go into not finishing books (called "DNF"s lol)
https://tracydurnell.com/2023/08/19/my-reading-philosophy-an...
Absolutely. In 2020 I gave myself permission to simply abandon books and it has really helped me out.
Some open-world video games are very long to finish, but they have a primary story/quest that's not too hard to complete, so it doesn't feel bad to stop there. Time is important, watching a series instead of a film is rarely worth it.
Technical books have whole sections you can easily skip until the day you may need it. Non-fiction can be read faster when it's explained in details.
I guess fiction big books are the ones you have to read entirely to be satisfied.
The books that I feel compelled to finish are those for our neighborhood book club. The household that picks furnishes dinner, so I feel that there is a contract there. (Not every one does. "Well, I've been really busy, and I listened to most of it.") This has led me to finish a few rotten books that I'd never have gone past page 20 on if I had encountered them at a beach house.
But you raise an interesting point. I really like The Hall of Uselessness by Simon Leys, but have I read every essay in it? I think so, but am not sure.
I understand for a novel or something. But for an essay, not finishing it is sometimes not finishing the argument and therefore not understanding the point at all.
I guess the article's point is that an essay is presenting one idea in the smallest amount of sentences possible. Imagine you do that and get an essay with 100 pages. It means that 90 pages is not enough to understand the idea. Now, imagine I uselessly triple the number of pages by repeating each sentence in 3 different ways. In this case, if I just read the first 100 pages and stop, I did not understood the idea, and reading these 100 pages was at best useless (the situation is the same as if I did not know the idea at all) or more realistic counter-productive (I have badly understood the idea).
An essay collection is multiple essays.
As for one 100-page essay, you should definitely be able to understand the idea within 90 pages (hopefully 10 pages). The author might need 100 pages to close off all major counterarguments, cite precedence, explore some second-order tradeoffs, underscore the importance of their argument using evidence, and lay the groundwork for future areas of investigation.
We could say "just cut out that stuff" but that weakens the essay and makes it shallow. Instead, it's uo to the reader to skip it if they don't have time or interest. But then they should also hold off on dismissing it based on counterarguments for which they declined to read the provided rebuttals.
if im reading a big sci-fi anthrology, i just search for key-terms that interest me and read the stories that contain them (eg, robot, colony,planet etc)
Nowadays, reading is mostly a meditative exercise for me. I'm not an "infovore" so I don't care about the velocity of ideas entering my head. Otherwise why not just go on Blinkist and read (or better yet listen to) book summaries. I also get the sense that the 300-page book that takes a week to read probably sinks into my brain better than a 100-pager; perhaps for the simple fact that the 300-pager takes longer to finish so I wrestle with the ideas for longer.
That being said, I do appreciate concisely written books. I wonder if our preference for shorter, more succinct writings is an inevitable outcome of the information age. So much data enter our eyeballs every day. Maybe we just have less tolerance for "fluff" compared to our ancestors. Older writings tend to be much "wordier". One example that comes to mind is the Einstein quote about simplicity from 1933: "It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience". I prefer the condensed version: "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler".
Yes! I have a completely unfounded theory that sounds right to my gut that basically all that matters is time and focus. If you want to learn something all you need is time and focus, you can't get there with just one of those two, you need both.
The night before an exam, I can focus really hard and get a bunch of info crammed into my head, but it's all gone a week later. I haven't tried Blinkist but I struggle to imagine how it's any different.
A long books beauty is the path one takes to get to the conclusion the auther arrived at (over a much larger period of time themselves!), the debate, the details, the story, that's where the real "lessons" are. You can't just rip a page out of here and there, read them and call it a day. I mean you can, you just need to be honest with yourself in terms of what you're really doing.
There are no shortcuts to learning, you are always trading something away.
You might be interested in Attention Economy:
> Attention economics is an approach to the management of information that treats human attention as a scarce commodity and applies economic theory to solve various information management problems.
Blinkist is fabulous for mgmt and idea type books that the author talks about.
Those are the ones I think tend to bloat with repetitive idea rehashing.
I think problem is not as much as wordier sentences as sentences devoid of meaning or the same stuff repeated too many times to fill a 300 page book.
I still prefer the original version of the classics to abridged versions.
I think this author is talking about a subset of non-fiction books, and we may as well call them "non-fiction idea" books, where the writer has a single idea they want to convince you of. On Tyranny does that. And sure, maybe books like Checklist Manifesto and The Goal could have been reduced to a hundred tight pages.
The hundred page idea definitely doesn't apply to non-fiction in general though. I can't imagine a history book or a biography covering what they need in a hundred pages. I don't think Chip War could be reduced.
> And sure, maybe books like Checklist Manifesto and The Goal could have been reduced to a hundred tight pages.
The Checklist Manifesto came from a New Yorker article. The article was perfect, the book is repetitive and full of stuff (building plans for a office tower are a checklist — sure, and at that point the word has lost all its meaning).
Read the article! Really, it‘s great. Skip the book.
And the book is rather thin already, not some 600 pager.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/12/10/the-checklist
I have written four books in the 60-80 thousand word range and one (a commission) where I had a constraint of 30 thousand words or 100 pages. I know it’s a cliché, but guess which one took me the longest.
Like that quote from Twain: "I apologize for such a long letter - I didn't have time to write a short one."
(Edit: perhaps that's the cliché you were hinting at!)
I've been leaning in this direction for several years, now. Longer books generally are a) trying to do too many things at once, or b) demonstrate that the author doesn't understand their topic very well, or c) are filled with padding, usually as some form of Social Proof or similar, with irrelevant "case studies" or 500 irrelevant footnotes/references so on.
Quite similar with 2 hour long "podcasts". There's little to no respect for the subject, the audience, or the "author" on display in most of these. Exceptions tending to prove the "rule".
I find PhD dissertations to be a good fit for this. They are usually required to provide background on the field, an argument for why the covered research is state of the art and some actual example of original research. 80-200 pages depending on the field.
There are two types of good books: short ones, and longer ones with indicies and summaries after each chapter. Then there is the other 95%. Or is it 99%?
Its hard to write a good book. That makes them so valuable.
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I would enjoy a big list, of no more than 100 pages, of books that are around hundred pages.
But don’t dare try to sneak any 100-page-or-less books in there about yet more 100-page-or-so books
For most self help / productivity books, I agree pretty strongly with this take. A lot of those types of books (Atomic Habits, Getting Things Done, Measure What Matters as some examples) often feel like they could have been reduced to a blog post, or series of blog posts at most. They were good books, but I did feel like there there was some padding to slog through in each chapter.
Usually, the point is communicated fairly quickly a few paragraphs into the chapter and then belaboured for pages with one or two anecdotes that don’t lend much more weight to the strength/validity of the point for me.
I've spent a lot of my life practicing the 300-word idea, so the 100-page idea seems pretty sensible. When I think of the 500-page+ books I've read, the intent of every one of them was to create separation and distance from something conventional or to pull apart a lot of different ideas to make room for their new one. Others are to create a set of exhaustive variations to show it the core idea is generally applicable or somehow essential.
A lot of it is discourse to preempt critics, where history shows almost universally that this is time wasted.
I heard that you need to condense your idea down to an elevator pitch and that VC's only like founders under 18?
> that VC's only like founders under 18?
My apologies if I’m missing the sarcasm — is this a joke? Sure there’s a stereotype of young founders, but where on earth did you hear that they prefer _actual teenagers_?
I assume the missing word is "seconds", as I think "elevator pitch" normally means "30 seconds to 2 minutes".
So: "founders under 18 seconds".
I think a lot of comments are missing the point : it’s not about page size.
Today, most book writers are following a template of about 300-pages imposed by their editor, this (non justified) rule sold as a sweet spot is being (blindly?) applied by most authors and seems to be producing books that are unfocused.
What should be understood from the blog article is not that 100-pages books are inherently better, but that books should be written in a more focused way, without the unnecessary ceremony/anecdotes mostly added for the sole purpose of filling the void necessary to reach the « imposed » 300 pages recommendation.
It varies by book genre, but there are clearly page number requirements for each sub genre.
A history book will not be best selling if its not a giant doorstop of a book. A narrative non-fiction book will be shorter and snappier because different expectations hold.
A fantasy book should be a tome, etc etc.
For non-fiction, editors very much do enforce these limits. A short history book won't be taken seriously, unless its repackaged as a different type of book.
I am disappointed. I thought this was about an individual elucidating their own ideas across one hundred pages in a rough manuscript.
As far as books go, give me the 300 pagers. Inundate me. I’m ready. It’s time.
The internet has betrayed my intellect. 300 pages. Inundate me. I want to read the 300 pager that expands upon the 100-page idea. Inundate me. I’m ready. I’ve had it with the screen. Unless it can point me to the next time.
Nothing else will satisfy me. It’s apparent. I thirst inundation. Bring me the tome.
Inundate is a synonym for “overwhelm”. I do not believe one can be ready to be overwhelmed, definitionally.
I am readily disposed and immediately available to be overcome and overpowered by the tome. It is my expectation. I am prepared.
As unreasonable as that may sound to you, what use is a book these days otherwise?
Not unreasonable; rather, nonsensical.
I understand that you’re trying to be poetic, and I can appreciate both the goal and the underlying sentiment, I just don’t think the linguistic construction works.
What word(s) do you think would be more appropriate?
I am amused by the business authors who give away their book for free online, and then charge money for the shorter executive summary. $$$ Me, I've read Webster's 3rd cover to cover.
> the hundred page idea
Did they read Matthew Walther's The One Hundred Pages Strategy and not understand it?
Is there a 'One Hundred Page' manifesto somewhere that relates to this blog?
Anyway, good blog post in it's own right.
On one hand anyone well traveled in life can see 200-300+ page non-fiction books are padded heavily.
On the other hand 300+ pages is like gong to the gym or walking up a mountain in this micro-fix world.
> On one hand anyone well traveled in life can see 200-300+ page non-fiction books are padded heavily
One of my peeves is than an otherwise good story has to be contorted to fit the conventions of the medium. So many books would be an excellent 80 pages, but are many times longer.
An interesting experience I had was deciding to enter my novel into a contest, and discovering the contest had strict requirements on how long each chapter had to be. They could have set a total word count requirement but instead they wanted X chapters of Y-Z total words.
It was interesting to re-edit my novel to fit this format because in some cases, it created this awful impetus to 'pad out' key moments or the flow of the plot in order to hit the Y mark, and in other cases I had 'too much' and might need to cut an interesting moment short or trivialize what someone was saying to fit it all into a 'chapter'.
Where before, I had just written more or less how much I thought needed to be on the page, which meant I had some chapters that were 500 words long and some that were 2000 words long.
In the end I think it improved the work in a few places just through the process of being edited again (for the 10th or 11th time - try writing a novel sometime, that part is fun, editing it all over and over is the hard part), but overall having new conventions enforced on it was just a lot of busywork, and the work breathed much better when allowed to be concise at the right moments and verbose at others.
A good lesson for me in terms of 'not all constraints are useful ones', since I'm used to thinking of constraints as something that enables creativity and productivity.
That's quite interesting. In the Red Rising series (a somewhat pulpy future dystopian story) chapter length is used in an entertaining way in one of the books. This is one of those POV character series, and one chapter has a long description of one character's struggles to get to a certain place so that they can ambush another, the resulting ambush, a somewhat detailed description of how he struggles to keep his life, and how that relates to the rest of his objectives. The next chapter is one paragraph from the protagonist of the series - an ubermensch-type fellow that is a journal log or something that goes "Encountered light resistance at $ambush_site". Pretty successful show don't tell there of the skill/strength disparity. The next chapter goes to a different POV. I enjoyed that clever trick with the chapter lengths.
I just went to read that article.
Why would an author complain that the average 12 books read by an average American a year is likely a combination of those who read nothing after high school and those that read vicariously yet not seek out a source, simply let an unverified, unsourced, unreferenced thing sit there.
It seems that reading 100 pages a day does not guarantee development of critical skills.
The answers to the author's lede are here: https://wordsrated.com/how-many-books-does-the-average-perso...
> Did they read Matthew Walther's The One Hundred Pages Strategy and not understand it?
Maybe. I can't remember if that was linked from something else I read or was that something else in its entirety. Maybe the comments skewed toward the writing instead. Because, for whatever reason, I came away feeling the same and this article felt like it was addressing something I had recently read here on HN.
kind reminder that timothy snyder isn’t held in great regard by other historians, even by right-wing ones—so, basically his own camp. especially on methodological grounds, omer bartov and richard evans have called out his use of chronological juxtaposition, saying it implies connections between events without enough evidence. this, along with other critiques, makes it an entertaining hundred page maybe, but not great value.
Snyder is right-wing? News to me!
(Speaking of right-wing historians, does anyone have thoughts on Richard Pipes? Specifically his book on the Russian Revolution. I found it fascinating, but it has been criticized, and I'm not sure how much credence to give the critiques.)
While we’re on the subject of reading advice, here’s mine. If I really want to learn something, like the history of the Russian Revolution, I have to read it three times. So, I’d read Pipes, then read Antony Beevor, then read China Mieville, then triangulate. Pick any three authors. Pipes was definitely conservative, but there is no such thing as completely objective history, especially on a topic like the Russian Revolution (arguably the most political event since the French Revolution)
I actually read Fitzpatrick's book on the Russian Revolution first. Her view was a lot different from that of Pipes, and I didn't feel well-positioned to adjudicate.
That's where my issue comes from. I don't think reading a 3rd book would solve it.
Pipes' account resonated better with my view of human nature, but maybe that's just my bias creeping in ;-)
Maybe the trick is to initially focus on well-studied areas of history where there is very little controversy, to calibrate your BS detector. Then once you're calibrated, you can be more judicious learning about the controversial stuff.
Thoughts on that strategy? If it seems good, I'd love to get some recs on specific "authoritative" history books which could be good for calibration purposes :-)
That's basically my strategy: try to start with more factual accounts. Sometimes, I start with the shorter accounts. Then move to the more opinionated or specific histories. It all depends on how closely you want to study a particular topic.
I'm just saying I don't feel like I know even the basic facts until I've seen them at least three times.
I don't have any other specific "authoritative" books to recommend. Maybe one of the Lenin or Stalin biographies? And Dr. Zhivago, of course...
You can also take Parfit’s advice and just read Sidgwick over and over.
BTW, Pipes was so hard on Lenin that he made me start thinking perhaps communism might've actually worked* if it wasn't for that Lenin guy.
* by "worked", I mean evolved into something more functional, benevolent, and incentives-aligned, perhaps akin to Nordic social democracy, or perhaps something novel
You're on to one of the biggest controversies of all: were all the big things that happened (an almost infinite list of almost infinite badness) due to Stalin, or was it Lenin, or did it all go bad starting with Marx? Or the French Revolution? Much ink and much blood spilled over those questions. Animal Farm touches on it (Orwell was a socialist but hated Stalin). Solzhenitsyn came to the opposite conclusion: that the Gulag and the purges started with Lenin. I don't think it will ever be settled.
yeah, Snyder is right-wing: "Snyder’s “century of blood,” with its “twinned totalitarianisms,” has become a new “common-sense,” liberal talking point — “Nolte with an NPR tote bag,” as a colleague put it. His Bloodlands is just a more sophisticated rendering of suggestive correlation between Nazism and the Soviet Union, legitimizing formerly fringe-nationalist dogmatic talking points, while hiding behind extremely problematic chains of citation. He has proved repeatedly willing to connect Nazi atrocities to Soviet crimes. Even Wehrmacht-veteran historians like Joachim Fest, who minimized the Holocaust, made clear that it was Hitler, not Stalin, who was “devoid of any civilizing ideas.” https://jacobin.com/2023/01/soviet-union-memorials-nazi-germ...
Is there anyone besides Jacobin who claims Snyder is right-wing? Of course from Jacobin's perspective, nearly everyone is right-wing.
even by right-wing ones—so, basically his own camp
Snyder isn't right-wing at all. Where did that come from?
> Where did that come from?
His ass.
every professional historian ever...
[dead]
Snyder has been defined ad “nolte with an NPR tote bag” (Nolte being the Ernst Nolte) for his work comparing communism with nazism https://jacobin.com/2023/01/soviet-union-memorials-nazi-germ...
Snyder has been defined as “Nolte with an NPR tote bag”
The difference between you and I is that when I encounter a blunt, ad hominem smear like this (noticed the unsourced formulation "A colleague says ...", in the same way that Trump says things like "People say she's a Marxist" to cheering crowds), I tend to go, "Okay, another vitriolic rant. Am I going to have time to finish ploughing through this? Probably not."
Whereas your gut take seems to be some form of: "Yesss! Score one for the team! Where can I get more of this stuff?"
The article is full of other raw insinuations, and plainly broken argumentation that should be jumping out at you.
But go ahead, read whatever you want, and import whichever memes you want.
Power of LLMs. Bring any book down to as short as you like. Or as long, if that's more your alley.