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.