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Comment by ericdykstra | Hacker News Reader

I'm trying to just not read "single-idea" books at all any more, especially of the "take a 30 minute TEDx talk and turn it into 352 pages" variety. If a book isn't worth reading cover-to-cover, it's not worth reading at all.

After suffering through most of "Grit" I just couldn't take it any more and vowed not to read a book like that again. It was one of a few books I've read that's just taking an existing idea (in this case, trait conscientiousness), re-branding it as something else (grit), and then page after page of hammering the same point + anecdotes.

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I am glad other people get that feeling too. A lot of pop-sci books are not terribly bad but could be cut down to 1/4 of their length. Another example for this is "Deep work" by Cal Newport. Great idea, something to actively think about. But not necessary to be spread out across 300 pages...

Wow. Yes. I have seen this book recommended endlessly online, but I found it near unreadable when I finally picked it up.

It reads like a student paper trying to meet a word count. Constant detours, references, and needless, lengthy quoting (says Prof xyz, in his paper [paper] of June 8th....) to pad out a blog post into a book.

I did find its aimlessness useful for falling asleep, though.

As a counterexample, I felt "The Information" could have easily been three times its size.

I felt like The Information was published when the author got tired of revising halfway through. It started very well but the quality seemed to slide as it progressed. It certainly wasn't the low quality meandering pop-sci book you'll find so often, but I found it lacking in different ways. You might also like Dark Hero of the Information Age

That's a book I've approached conversationally -- asking it questions, essentially. And been somewhat frustrated by promising hints of deeper meanings not revealed.

I'm reading "Deep Work" currently, and I agree with your sentiment. I find myself ironically losing focus and thinking about how I can get the meat of this book from a blog post a tenth of the size. The case-studies he presents are interesting though, so I keep reading.

Yeah, I agree on Deep Work. There's probably a collection of Cal's blog posts that would get the idea across just as well in a fraction of the time.

I guess the publishers need a minimum page count to sell the book and that has some influence on it.

I too feel like that with a lot of books.

A better question is 'did this book have to be written?' and with most of what you see in the bookshop window the answer is 'no'.

If the answer is 'yes' then I can tolerate the single idea taking up a whole book.

If the author then goes on to write a second, third, fourth book then they have probably crossed over from writing books that needed to be written to just regurgitating the same idea, based on the fame of the first book.

Publishing is an industry and they know how to do marketing.

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