The Trouble with Books | Hacker News Reader

The Trouble with Books

arnoldkling.substack.com

13 pointsherbertl20 comments

That’s an odd criticism for “Guns, Germs, and Steel”—the major thesis might be able to be summarized in a short passage, but the book is long because it considers that thesis from a bunch of different directions, building up an argument from a pile of distinct evidence. The point of the book isn’t to just state something, but to show why it is true.

It would be like complaining about how long a math proof is, when the theorem being proven itself is only a line or two.

This put into words why I didn't agree with the linked post. I agree with a couple of assertions of the author (such as, utilize and adapt to the internet, cause we're never getting rid of it), but they don't do anything to acknowledge that there is value in the process.

Yeah. I need to reread it but Miguel De Landa's A 1000 Years of Non-linear History gave me a lot of framing & ideation, around the same time as GG&S, that imo served me well. And it did so by elaborating through examples &showing patterns & building the metaphor up.

Yes it reduces down to some core ideas. But the wandering around, across how widely those core ideas (some lovely artistic references to geomorphology, in A1kYoNH's case) applied again and again, was what build the 'bumper sticker' idea into a pattern I could see & discern. Neither would have been a formative experience without.

Typically only the lowest form of nonfiction books are about conveying an idea. Ideas are a dime a dozen. Better books make an argument, which requires mustering evidence, or they tell a story, which requires unfolding a narrative. You could summarize A Bridge Too Far in a couple sentences, but your would not thus recreate the experience of reading it.

> Books like Guns, Germs, and Steel or Thinking Fast and Slow turn out to be bumper stickers with hundreds of pages attached. Your aspiration should not be to write one of those.

Well duh. You should aspire to write a book that's actually good. /snark

Quips aside, I see this more as an issue with a particular breed of popsci topic rather than with nonfiction books as a format; some topics genuinely deserve that much breadth. I read a fascinating book about rabies that would've been sad and pithy if it were condensed into an essay. And historical-y books in particular die on the page without detail—there's a reason And The Band Played On is, what, six hundred pages?

Also, everyone's different, but I'm not sure OP realizes that some people read for the experience of reading, not just the information contained within.

Once you know enough about a subject, you may find that examples or stories are bloat, but it may be necessary for the reader to have a visualization of the ideas that are presented. Something like "Deep Work" or "Getting Things Done" can be downsized to a page. The stories give a frame of reference to the ideas.

I find Cal Newport quite repetitive. He has some good ideas, I'm sure - but his recent book "Digital Minimalism" was a disappointing read. It was very much a rehash of Deep Work in simpler terms with some portion of the book dedicated to discussing the Amish and Mennonites.

Several parts of the book felt very disjointed. One such part of the book discussed a colleague of his, whose entire name he kept repeating every other sentence. In contrast to other section of the book, where he only stated their first name a couple of times. Then parts meandered into segments about Solitude that just felt out of place. It just felt tenuous.

This book could have easily been just a series of essays. In fact, essays probably would have reached a bigger audience - but you can't cash on previous successes and make bank that way.

I split my non-fiction books in two rough types: Non-fiction—when my aim is to understand some ideas—and technical—when I seek to improve my skill. Some of the first can be bloated. But I only read in a linear fashion on my first skim. Just seeing what's the main ideas are and the author's perspective on them. I view stories taken as example as a kind of slice of life illustrating the ideas.

On subsequent reads, if the book warrants it, I just go straight to what I need. If I have the time to do so, I summarize it, put it in my wiki, and uses that instead. I never remember the author's words—if there's a sentence I like, I quote it in my wiki—, only the ideas. How it is phrased don't matter as long I can understand. If the writing is atrocious, I just quit. The only books I'm really critical are fiction books, because they promise a good story.

In mathematics, there are whole books almost completely dedicated to problems you are supposed to work out. Or the prose is terse and dense, like Rudin's textbooks on real analysis. They are valuable books, but they aren't often recommended to beginners. You can use a bit of sugar to make the medicine go down.

I think books are often long to give the reader some space to think. Perhaps the best readers know how to create their own space, but the worst readers require the sugar. In other words, books are long because people aren't good readers.

> In other words, books are long because people aren't good readers.

Sometimes, it's just that the reader just don't have the foundational concepts required to quickly grasp the ideas. And sometimes ideas are just so universal that giving a specific perspective is the important thing. Proofs are important for theorems because they explains the why and the how. And stories works great for that. I guess it can be overdone as all things, but one is allowed to skip parts one already understand.

"Have you ever had a book like this—one you’d read—come up in conversation, only to discover that you’d absorbed what amounts to a few sentences?"

Of course, the few sentences you can recall are not going to be the same for all readers; you can't say, that was the most important point for everyone. I mean, can you imagine the editor of say, Richard Rhodes' Making of the Atomic Bomb saying, no one will remember this bit about Lise Meitner's escape from Germany on an expired passport, you can cut that.

If you, as a reviewer, think that your review has really encapsulated everything anyone would get out of the book you're reviewing, you're either the greatest reviewer ever or an arrogant delusional dork.

> If you, as a reviewer, think that your review has really encapsulated everything anyone would get out of the book you're reviewing, you're either the greatest reviewer ever or an arrogant delusional dork.

To be fair, many recent non-fiction books are just bloatware version of a single blog article. While no one can summarize "War and Peace" or "Critique of Pure Reason", it is certainly possible to deflate a lot of these non-fiction insight porn books back into an original length blog.

That's partly because your memory is limited and that's the best you could do. Someone else will remember more. Certainly for dense, academic books. For pop-science and business books, being able to distill it down to a sentence or two is a reflection of its long-windedness.

Certainly many books today are over-written, but I also wonder if the general reader today is less adept at reading. Skills like memorization and a person's depth and breadth of knowledge all play a part in what you get out of reading and I feel like one could make the case that the average educated reader 100 years ago was better at these things than people today.

Reading is like swimming or running. Everybody can do it, but levels of skills differ.

This article is too long. It should simply say: "Be concise."

I think there are some good ideas there, but some of the points ad the conclusion is not.

First, not all books are the same. Even if you limit your case of study to non fiction books.

For me (at least, some) books are like a conversation, you listen someone transmitting an idea in a more or less comprehensive way, but not as a bullet point list, but bringing your train of thoughts on those ideas and concepts, pretty much like the conversation we have with ourselves. That is one of its strengths, not defects. You must think like the author, take his point of view, put the knowledge it tries to transmit in the "right" perspective.

But is one sided conversation, you are just listening, and while listening, it is just a temporary state of mind not good for placing that new knowledge in your own frame of mind. And it takes time, requires attention, keeping context between pauses in reading, a real world intruding all time and so on.

But I think we have already the capability of taking a step forward from there, or at least pretty close to that. If I give an LLM a book (or book collection) to an LLM, could we have a proper conversation with "the author" on what is discussed there? Apply that knowledge to things happening around us and putting examples closer to home? Ask questions and clarifications? Probably there are already a bunch of websites doing exactly that.

The point of books is the journey, not the destination.

Obviously the author of the article is biased because if books were shorter he could write more reviews :)

If I have a great idea that can be conveyed in 1000 words, will I get paid the same for my pamphlet as I would a book?

No more books!

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