In praise of the hundred page idea
tracydurnell.com
tracydurnell.com
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.
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 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.
https://tracydurnell.com/2023/08/19/my-reading-philosophy-an...
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.
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.
Even if you are right, you still acknowledge that you need a "core" explanation for the essay and that stopping before finishing it is not enough to grasp the idea properly. The only things the author of the article says is that it's better if the core explanation is not stretched in length for no real reason. So, it demonstrates that it is not the same as for a novel. The so-called "paradox" or "hypocrisy" does not exist.
It's like pretending that someone is hypocritical if they both say "I like movies where the main character does a lot of fighting" and "I really don't like the fact that my physics professor does a lot of fighting during their lecture".
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.
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".
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.
Those are the ones I think tend to bloat with repetitive idea rehashing.
I still prefer the original version of the classics to abridged versions.
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.
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.
(Edit: perhaps that's the cliché you were hinting at!)
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".
Its hard to write a good book. That makes them so valuable.
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.
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_?
So: "founders under 18 seconds".
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.
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.
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.
As unreasonable as that may sound to you, what use is a book these days otherwise?
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.
(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.)
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 :-)
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...
* by "worked", I mean evolved into something more functional, benevolent, and incentives-aligned, perhaps akin to Nordic social democracy, or perhaps something novel
Snyder isn't right-wing at all. Where did that come from?
His ass.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.