Books Are Getting Longer
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Re: article, it's disheartening that good books suffer from this as well. I've recently read "The power of habit" and "Think fast and slow". Both are great, but both would be much better at the half of their size.
For most non-fiction content the magazine article is too short (3-8 pages) and only skims over the issue. It's evident when you read an article on something you're very familiar with. However book is too long (300 pages) and introduces filler and repetitions. I find that Special Reports from The Economist are quite good in size and depth (15-30 pages). My ideal would be around 100 pages, but those reports are still my go-to place if I want to read something.
This brings to mind a comment Jason Fried made in Rework:
“Writers eliminate good pages to make a great book. We cut this book in half between the next-to-last and final drafts. From 57,000 words to about 27,000 words. Trust us, it’s better for it.”
But the body of the article contains nothing to the contrary, so it seems the submitter's edit was in keeping with the guidelines (i.e. change the title if it is misleading).
I read this policy paper on nuclear weapons that I found in the trash near my house. It consisted of five essays, each essay critiquing the prior essays. The repetition combined with argumentation had a powerful effect and forced me to engage in thinking about the issue under discussion. I wish more books would do that. It was around 80 pages which was a perfect length.
"Proposal for No First Use of Nuclear Weapons: Pros and Cons, Policy Memorandum no. 28 (Center of International Studies, Princeton University, September, 1963"
More details can be found Google books[0].
I wrote a review of a related book which I found in the same pile: There Will be no Time[1].
[0]: https://books.google.com/books?id=sVq6jgEACAAJ&dq=Proposal+f...
[1]: http://ethanheilman.tumblr.com/post/29405762446/there-will-b...
Well, how about the completion rates of physical books? I am sure most people would rather read smaller, to the point books if they could. Moreover, there are also social brownie points associated with buying thick books. If everyone is talking about it, buying that popular book in physical form will increase the aesthetic look of my "home library" and then when people come over, I can show off how well read I am.
Also the top comment on the article page importantly notes:
"AAARRRGGGGHHH!!!
Count the words, not the pages!!!! Some simple typesetting changes can increase or decrease a books page count significantly.
A bigger book may look more intimidating, but it may also look like better value for money, and if production/material costs have gone down over the last 15 years, I wouldn't be at all surprised if a publisher bumps up the paragraph spacing and brings in the page margins to make a book appear longer than it is."
Kind of similar to Steam games - 37% of games were never played. If I can get a set of Witcher 1,2,3 for the price of one + $1, then I'm definitely getting all of them, even if I'm really interested in the third one only right now.
Textbooks have this problem as well until you hit graduate subjects.
Sometimes there is a good idea hidden in those kind of books but most of the times it's just a cheap shallow story you've read before in a different setting. I consider it a sign that the author either was forced to write a sequel/prequel or that he's just a bad writer. Most of the times, I don't touch those authors works again.
I have no idea how you can cope with all that utter irrelevance in this. While reading I started thinking that Stephenson tried to create a "moment" by overstreching. A scenery. Something you see in those slow artistic movies for example. But then there is another problem. Stephenson is unable to describe the environment in which the scene plays. Instead he concentrates on completely irrelevant details in the current area. A good example for this was when the protagonist traveled a region where former cities were. It looked like that: "...traveling along those dead cities we've learned to distinguish the time period in which the cities have been build...". But he describes not a single one. You end up having absolutely no picture of the environment. He tells you that there are launch pads and anti-missile turrets but not how they look. Instead he drags you through several sentences regarding the steel rubble they get from the cities. Spoiler: it's rusty. Same poor writing goes for character development (main character is supposed to be clever according to the context but is plainly stupid and really slow...), basic aspects like the love story or the weird way he describes women.
I don't know. Maybe I'm just too demanding but I currently read through some of Alestair Raynolds works and it makes Stephenson look like a rich school boy whos private teacher was afraid to mark the basic mistakes for him.
I've read Snow Crash many years ago. When Neuromancer and the art of those times was still in my head. Fortunately because it was exactly the same thing. Please read Snow Crash again and try to focus on the world he un-describes. I had the feeling like Stephenson took it for granted that you've already read Gibson or Sterling and knew how the world is supposed too look like so he can concentrate on world details that are completely irrelevant for the story and make no sense without describing the place they stand in.
You see...I fell twice for Stephenson which was a mistake on my side so I'm pretty angry on myself and try do divert the fault to him...
If you read Stephenson for character or environment description, or even a coherent story, you will have a bad time. If you want to read about strange ideas from a guy who spent way too much time thinking about submarine cables, you may have a good time, if that's your thing and you like the topic he is currently interested in. I am (usually) in the latter category.
Reynolds is a different guy. Better story teller, more conventional ideas to me. (I like and have read about all his books too).
If you like Reynolds, try Peter Hamiltons series, especially the Nights Dawn trilogy.
Indie authors also often point out that they're better off splitting one massive tome into multiple parts. A novel like Neal Stephenson's Seveneves might've been split into three to five parts, with the first one given away and each additional part $.99 – $2.99 in its ebook edition.
EDIT: Also, I'm not opposed to being commercial, and indeed if I could think of more / better ways to be more "commercial" I'd do it!
(Installments aside, Seveneves needed heavy editing. Great plot, but probably about 1/3 cruft. I get it; you studied orbital mechanics & it's cool, but the 100th detailed explanation of orbital transfer is too much)
(Btw, I didn't really mind the orbital stuff in Anathem, but I found the repetitive explanations of the many-worlds idea, adding just one tiny new tidbit each time, a little annoying by the end.)
It would have been more satisfying to me if the dialog on the mountain was actually important in the context of the story at all. It was enlightening to the reader, but when Erasmus got to the convox and started talking with people, it turned out that many of them already had basically the same ideas, so he didn't really contribute anything.
Actually, it's hard to think of a point where any idea or action of Erasmus actually changed the outcome of something. He was at the center of everything, but only as a witness. Although I guess the book kind of hints that perhaps nothing that any character except Jad did had any effect on anything, since Jad rewrote it all...
I read only fiction, slightly less than a book a week. This year I've read books between 75 and 1200 pages and I dont think there is any correlation between length and my enjoyment.
I do notice that for many authors their self-proclaimed 'masterpiece' tends to be their longest book. And in many cases, not their best.
Compare "Back to the Future" (any one) with whatever new movie in this genre you can remember.
On the other hand, it's also only 100 min. long, so it doesn't exactly fit with trend of longer movies.
I don't think those films you mention are actually mainstream hollywood productions.
In which case, the ~60 minute length is not surprising: it has been the case for lots of alternative films over the decades, and it's the very cutoff point lots of film festivals use to separate the two categories (though the Academy uses 40 minutes for that purpose).
They're also great if you lead a sedentary lifestyle (e.g. in front of computer all day). Reading books will probably necessitate more sitting around, but with audiobooks you can be a little bit more active and go out for a jog or walk.
For me, I can digest one much quicker than reading.
I got a few from Audible this year. The content is great, but their one size fits all credit system is archaic. I would love to see a Spotify-like audio book subscription service.
The 2 credit per month plan covers my needs pretty well. In some occasions I've had to buy extra credits, but it still ends up being much cheaper than buying individual audiobooks.
It definitely pushes you to strike a balance between longer and shorter books, though. It's kinda crazy that a 4-hour story like The Magic Goes Away and a a 50-hour novel like A Dance with Dragons both end up consuming 1 credit.
I've definitely noticed my mind wander once I start reading a book. It seems like we can all benefit from training our attention span.
I don't think it is effective to read scientific literature from cover to cover. I think the best scientists skim.
My usual habit is to check out 5 books at a time from the library, and I end up finishing one. The other 4 I skim through. There's simply not that many books that are worth reading in their entirety. Many books have useful nuggets of knowledge, but there is generally a lot of filler.
I have read at least 1000 academic papers in CS and other fields in the last 5 years. And by read I mean mostly skimmed. A good paper will get 3 or 4 re-readings; most papers remain skimmed until something else reminds me of them (a paper or a problem in real life). I think that is the norm.
I do find that paper is better for comprehension. I get my books from the library and I print out PDFs of publications.
tl;dr The goal is comprehension, not "finishing books"
Now if only we could convince the rest of the world to make abstracts the norm for books, internet articles, and the like...
At university, certain professors (aka one really naughty chemistry professor) expected complete mastery of the subject and would have several questions in the examination that were not even covered by the assigned reading. (He expected us to read the entire textbook anyway)
I also prefer technical manuals in PDFs and just CTRL+ F through them as needed.
I'm not a scholar or a student, but I read a lot of "non-fiction." Some of it is professional, but mostly it's because of an urge to understand the world and people. This fascination has a limitless quality that makes it almost painful. I feel massively ignorant, and that's reinforced every time I find a new subject of which I am clueless. The mass of knowledge and thought is so enormous.
I recently learned about von Humboldt's late 1800s masterwork, the multi-volume "Kosmos," a guide to the known world of natural science, with a 1000-paged index. And now that knowledge is outdated, except that "Kosmos" dedicates itself to the history of science, and now that work itself is a part of that very history. And so it goes on and on.
One of my Kindle reads at the moment is "The Practice of Everyday Life" by Miche de Certeau. It might be disappointing to announce up front that I haven't read much of it yet, but that itself is part of my point. Sensing a relevant connection, I looked at the Table of Contents and found that Chapter XII is "Reading as Poaching." I turn to it and skim a few pages of stuff about French politics and find a servicable quote:
> In the eighteenth century, the ideology of the Enlightenment claimed that the book was capable of reforming society, that educational popularization could transform manners and customs, that an elite's products could, if they were sufficiently widespread, remodel a whole nation. This myth of Education inscribed a theory of consumption in the structures of cultural politics.
That goes along nicely with the book's theme of refuting an implicit "productivist" bias and highlighting the way "users" and "consumers" are always themselves creative, tactical, and in some sense subversive with regard to the stuff presented to them as "finished products."
When reading the book, I sometimes feel aversion to the countercultural eagerness to demonize the systems of power, but I also don't disagree -- it's just a vague feeling of "yes, yes, sure, get on with it..." Still, I find the author's perspective very interesting and useful, and I'm enjoying "poaching" from the book.
A few pages later:
> To write is to produce the text; to read is to receive it from someone else without putting one's own mark on it, without remaking it. In that regard, the reading of the catechism or of the Scriptures that the clergy used to recommend to girls and mothers, by forbidding these vestals of an untouchable sacred text to write continues today in the "reading" of the television programs offered to "consumers" who cannot trace their own writing on the screen where the production of the Other -- of "culture" -- appears.
Yes, yes... I agree! The vague feeling is still present, and I start to understand that it's related to a rather uncharitable tiredness with "postmodernism" or "poststructuralism," references to "the death of the author," and so on. I can't identify anything specifically wrong with any of this. There is a looming sense that if I were forced to explain to someone in this restaurant what I am reading and writing about, I might come across as some kind of flakey weirdo. They don't even know the other book I'm working on is about Heidegger... But I digress.
I'm not interested in all this because of a moral preference for the downtrodden over the elite and powerful, though I do have some of that. What interests me more is just simply what it is to be reading; what to actually do with books; how they function and circulate and affect people; and why they are, despite often being too long and dreary and just boring, irresistible.
In "The Rebel Sell," another one of those books that I continue to think about and reference many years later, the authors make the provoking claim that, contrary to the self-images of most tourists, backpackers, and lovers of foreign culture, the only authentic way to travel is on business trips. With a tangible reason to go abroad, a plausible desire for mutual exchange, instead of the usual leering and viewing and aimless wandering, the business traveller is authentically engaged and directed by a real project.
I would propose some other equally authentic modes. Someone who loves to take photos is also guided on their travels by a skillful project, a context of self-actualization and learning, and so on. Likewise someone who is researching for a story, or just someone who likes to get laid. It strikes me that "The Rebel Sell" might be attacking a straw-man idea of a person who travels only to gaze, to enjoy consumptively, to "appreciate." In fact we all seem to make up projects even if only as surrogate activities. Taking a front-lit snapshot of every single attraction one finds listed in the Lonely Planet might not be very sophisticated, but mostly we just need something, anything, to do.
Of course I am metaphorically equating books with places to make a point about the activities involved in reading. A scholar researching the literature to find a good reference is on a kind of business trip. Chapters that fail to support her argument she walks past like trinkets on a market promenade when searching for a particular kind of hat. She doesn't demand that the text be superbly beautiful or worthy of an appreciative gaze. She's not enjoying the book like you enjoy the wine on a countryside vineyard vacation; she's critical, practical, and absorbed in an activity for the sake of a project.
That seems to be to be the reason why she can study large amounts of literature without becoming "bored" or "distracted" or being very concerned about "attention span." She's working; she doesn't get paid to merely enjoy; she might often enter states of flow even while hopping wildly from book to book, scribbling furiously, underlining, making mental connections. She may use various tactics, including skimming, only reading a preface, or going straight to the index. If she is studying a work of fiction to comment on its narrative structure, she might want to read it cover to cover to get the usual effect, but she might also want to obtain a gist of the plot and then engage in some other ways of reading, even ways as far removed from conventional reading as plotting word frequencies.
As for me, writing bloated comments on internet forums is, perhaps unfortunately, a driving force in my whole practice of reading. I submit these ramblings because I need a question and an audience in order to write anything; otherwise I just sit and stare at the empty screen, pondering my own useless vacuity, feeling not just bored but confused in a metaphysical sense: why ever do anything, really? What is "thinking"? Who am I? If I desire to discuss, though, that gives me real motivation, and reading too acquires a new role.
That all said, I remain curious about other peoples' "practice of everyday life" and their ways of engaging with books. Also about how we could make books more fun. A new kind of book club? Come up with something, please.
I wouldn't go so far as to say that reading for comprehension, or travelling for business are the ONLY way of doing those things. That would be a bit presumptuous. But they resonate with me.
What I'm trying to avoid is the ailment of unproductive information addiction. Many people are complaining about this these days. It happens with fiction too -- there was a piece in the NY Times Book Review awhile back, where the author was questioning why he was such a voracious reader, when he could seldom remember things he read. He felt guilt at not remembering. It's even the case that some people forget THAT they read a book, not just the contents of the book...
To elaborate on reading, I feel like some good tests of whether reading was worthwhile are:
1) If I can build something that I couldn't build before (usually programming, but sometimes other things). This often requires concentrated reading from many difference sources, and following citations.
2) If the material comes up in a conversation, or an Internet forum like HN. Being able to explain something in your own words, in a different context, means you actually understood it, rather than just passively consuming words.
3) If I'm reminded of it while reading something else, and especially if I'm compelled to make notes about it. I have a wiki with 2300 HTML pages of notes, accumulated over 11 years. Each page has dozens of links... if I manage to keep all this information relatively accessible, then I feel good. I like when I make a link to a page/idea that hasn't been touched in 2 years, 6 years, 10 years. That means I'm adding some value over the long term.
Basically it boils down to connecting it to other things, so you are consuming ideas rather than just words. I'm reminded of Paul Graham's idea of "forgetting who said something" -- you are learning some truth, rather than just what one author happened to believe and happened to argue persuasively.
On travel, I always feel like a curmudgeon when I'm not excited about vacations. In the "social circles" I seem to be in, vacations are somehow a mark of status. People like to talk about vacations.
I feel like it's a lot of sitting in planes and cars, walking, and eating and drinking. That's fun for part of the day, but I don't want to do it all day for a week or more? It just sounds boring. I would rather be engaged somehow. Consumption is not engagement IMO. Consuming should hopefully aid in production, and business is a good example of production.
Some people are good at making lifelong friends abroad, and I would say that is a worthy pursuit. But most people are not, (In any case I feel like the dynamics of this kind of friendship have changed a lot with the Internet -- its value has been reduced for better or worse.)
Anyway, I'm just saying what I am trying to get out of things. It's just one way of looking at things, but people seem to appreciate the idea of having some focus rather than chasing gratification. To be clear, I don't really consider myself a "productive" person, in that I spend a lot of time laying in bed too. But if I'm going to get out of bed, IMO that energy should be well spent :)
The main thing that people have to give themselves is time. Reading takes time, and a lot of people think 15 minutes before bedtime is enough.
One example:
The PhD thesis: "Political Protest and Dissent in the Khrushchev Era" by Robert Hornsby" (342 pages)
the book would be "Protest, Reform and Repression in Khrushchev's Soviet Union" by Robert Hornsby (324 pages)
I have so many books to read, that I don't bother finishing a book unless it's really good. The "some titles" are probably simply poor books.
Also, the number of pages isn't necessarily a good indicator of size. The typography can greatly influence the number of words on a page, and the typography can and does vary widely.
I've read plenty of long books in my lifetime.
> I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.
Is there an API to get book metadata for all books?
just kidding, I wouldn't know for sure, but this article should have graphs of wordcounts or something.
"It totals roughly 1,680,000 words"