I once heard that thick books generate a higher profit margin because people are willing to pay more for thick books. A change in thinking is needed: thinner books should be more expensive than they are today because buying them also saves time that would be lost reading thicker versions of the same books.
In defense, I’d say repetition, multiple examples, and generally marinating in a concept is what makes it stick and turn into action. A tweet or blog post is short but fleeting.
I have courses on Udemy. 265000 students. 197000 have never started. In the last 12 mths 96% of my students did not look at even one lecture. It’s not just books…
I will write a comment that I finish every book I start, and that I did actually finish your post too! (A quick skim) I actually don't think it's a good trait though. Even when I don't like a book or don't find it valuable, I am compelled to finish it, and I find that a waste of time. I've learned to be more discerning about which books I begin, though, and will skim first. (I also read a lot- I process speech quickly, so listen to audiobooks at a higher speed. Read print at a normal pace.)
Love this post - read it from start to finish! I think that there is also this thing that long term attention and effort is not something that naturally attracts the human mind. Instead, it loves to get a lot of information all at once, and our world has hijacked this tendency (e.g. social media: videos/podcasts... get ever more shorter, more condensed) - a bit similarly to our propensity to adore very sugary foods.
But there is a beauty, there is a sort of real change of mind, that can only happen by effortful, almost unfun, long processes. It's like you cannot exactly value the landscape on a montain top similarly when you did the painful climbing on your own vs. when you took the car, just quickly snapped a picture with your family and went back home. I have finished books I believed might not have been worth reading till the end, but I realized the struggle to get there, the pain I was trying to get through, was worth having. It's a muscle that needs to be built, although we tend to dislike building it.
On the other hand, if a book is already bad from the beginning: ditch it. Your mind deserves excellent food - and there are so many excellent food for thought out there, it would be a pitty to miss them for lack of time.
I’m surprised at how many book *reviewers* you suggest don’t read the whole book. If you are a reviewer, you have one job, which is to read the whole book, so you can let other people know whether or not they have to, and if they don’t have to, you should let them know which parts they should read, which requires you to have read all the parts.
It would be worth comparing this to academic papers. Most people never get past the abstract, and the ones that do usually don’t finish. There’s a good number of papers where I’ve just dipped into relevant sections without reading from the beginning.
We need to think about how people actually use papers and books, and write them to be used effectively in that way, rather than writing them assuming that most users read from beginning to end.
I think readers are making a choice -- and are thus taking some kind of risk -- each time they decide how much of a book to read. If it has a good beginning but gradually turns out to be a crappy one that wastes your time, it would be a loss to spend hours reading it from cover to cover. But if it turns out to have fruitful content throughout the entire book, it would be a loss -- or an incomplete gain at best -- to just read the first chapter and call it a day.
My personal thought is that whatever book it is, it's best to finish the whole thing. Even if it turns out to be crappy, there must be a reason why you think it's crappy, and by exploring that reason you still take away some kind of new knowledge or rediscovery of personal philosophy. This encourages me to finish whatever book I read each time, even if sometimes it takes more time than I expect.
Finished Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell last month. I have to admit I was tempted to give up 200 pages in when little had happened (and so many footnotes.)
Really glad I stuck with it because it is a rare book that you finish and say "sure it was 850 pages, but it could really use another 150 or so to round it out."
I wonder about the breakdown between people who read one book at a time vs the people who read several books simultaneously. I read simultaneously and sometimes I just never get back to one. Sometimes all or nearly all of what I am reading is of the same subject matter. And you wake up one morning and think .... no more Ottoman history for me today. Maybe I get back to the Ottomans later, but maybe not .... I also have a gut feeling that most of the people who finish books aren't highlighting them ... maybe have a poll about that some time?
Yeah, that is my problem too. I have so many books going at once, that I always feel the urge to jump to the next book if the book that I am reading does not captivate me. It is not necessarily bad, however, to read 10% of 10 books rather than 100% of one book. I most often give up when I feel that I have understood the main point of the book.
I love these reflections, Paul. As a nonfiction author, I think there's a communicative obligation to have the important qualifications up front alongside the main idea. (This is one of my complaints about Against Empathy.)
I also tend to conclude my introductory chapters by inviting readers to skip ahead if they get bored or bogged down, and to read the chapters in any order they like, though my guess is that few actually take this advice. It makes sense to write chapters fairly modularly anyway, since few people will remember the details of Chapter 2 by the time they're on Chapter 7.
I know this seems defensive, but I’m surprised by your complaint about AE. God knows there are a lot of reasonable ways to disagree with my views, but I begin the book in an unusual way—much of Chapter 1 responds to criticisms of earlier versions of my view, and so I am (perhaps boringly) careful to be clear about what I mean by empathy, what the scope of my argument is (it applies to morality, not other facets of life), and I even discuss cases where I agree that my argument doesn’t work. Whatever the flaws of AE, I do think that I meet up with the obligation you’re talking about.
It has been a long time, but my experience as a reader was that the book started out seeming very bold but accumulated qualifications along the way, resulting by the end in a more moderate position than I thought was suggested by the beginning.
I seem to remember writing a blog post about the author's obligation to guard carefully against obvious misreadings of their work and using Against Empathy as an example in which those misreadings weren't adequately prevented -- and I seem to recall your replying to that post. Oddly, I can't seem to find that post anymore. Maybe you convinced me I was being unfair and I took it down? The vicissitudes of memory....
Thanks for this post, which I enjoyed and identified with. I found your Substack because I started reading 'Against Empathy' (10% down so far, and it's a good read as well as interesting). I don't know yet whether I'll get to the end: like you, I begin far more non-fiction books than I finish. But there's the difference. I normally read a whole novel because, as you say about films, it's an artistic experience that I value.
Non fiction is different. Then I'm in a conversation with writers. Reading non-fiction nourishes my own thinking – that's why I do it. I can get distracted because an author has given me an idea that I want to go away and play with: that's what you've already done with 'Against Empathy'. I'll read on, but I might get distracted by another thread of thinking. Yesterday I finished a book by Kay Redfield Jamison I began two years ago because the moment to engage with her thinking had returned.
My point here is that there is a fundamental difference between reading as an intellectual practice, developing one's own thinking by engaging with any of the available resources – long books, short books, blog posts, podcasts, magazine articles, academic papers etc. – and reading for pleasure. Both are creative, but only the first requires the reader to engage with and understand the architecture of the whole. Doing that with non-fiction would mean limiting oneself to the tiny proportion of books that even an avid reader like myself can get through in a lifetime. Having studied literature as an undergraduate, it took me years to accept that I didn't have to finish a book just because I have started it. Now, I read in a much more creative way.
PS I found the part of Pierre Bayard's 'How to speak about books you haven't read' very interesting in this respect. It's notable that the French title 'Comment parler des livres que l'on a pas lus?' has a question mark at the end because the book is a philosophical enquiry; the absence of that punctuation mark in the English translation suggests that it was being marketed as a self-help book.
Agreed. One of the most common reactions I have to a non-fiction book I've started is "I'm reading the wrong book!" That is, the book has stirred up an idea or question in me that needs to be investigated first before this book can be profitably engaged with (if I decide to return to it). And that's OK! Or, at least, that's what I think, and since I'm in charge of what I read, what I say goes!
I hardly ever finish a book on kindle. If I like the book, I nearly always go out and buy a physical book, and then finish it on the physical copy. Also, I used to regularly buy cheap audiobooks along with a hard copy, and switch between the two editions to finish. Anyone looking at my listen data, would be totally confused by chapters listened to vs those skipped.
We can place non-fiction books on a scale from more novel-like cohesive works like biographies, all the way to reference works (dictionaries, encyclopedias) and essay collections by different authors where each chapter can be read in complete isolation from every other. Almost no one is reading the latter cover to cover, and that's fine.
As for popular airport non-fiction books— everyone knows that these books tend to be bloated to round out the expected word count, with the better bits towards the start, so people are going to tend to read until they think they've got the gist.
I once heard that thick books generate a higher profit margin because people are willing to pay more for thick books. A change in thinking is needed: thinner books should be more expensive than they are today because buying them also saves time that would be lost reading thicker versions of the same books.
As a time-starved person, I think most non-fiction books are 3-4x longer than they should be.
In defense, I’d say repetition, multiple examples, and generally marinating in a concept is what makes it stick and turn into action. A tweet or blog post is short but fleeting.
I think you are right. Lots of non-fiction books should be (or started as) an article.
One minor point, “On Bullshit” was turned into an 80 page book, but it’s just a 20 page paper that was reprinted on small pages with big font!
I have courses on Udemy. 265000 students. 197000 have never started. In the last 12 mths 96% of my students did not look at even one lecture. It’s not just books…
I will write a comment that I finish every book I start, and that I did actually finish your post too! (A quick skim) I actually don't think it's a good trait though. Even when I don't like a book or don't find it valuable, I am compelled to finish it, and I find that a waste of time. I've learned to be more discerning about which books I begin, though, and will skim first. (I also read a lot- I process speech quickly, so listen to audiobooks at a higher speed. Read print at a normal pace.)
I am still hung up on the fact anyone read any of “Leaning In”!
If you read books for information, you will not finish. Books are not spreadsheets (looking at you Sam B-F).
If you read to change your thinking, you have to put in the time or you don’t get the change. Of course, the book has to be worth it.
Many books I have read recently have good material for 60% then nonsense for the last bit (nonfiction).
Love this post - read it from start to finish! I think that there is also this thing that long term attention and effort is not something that naturally attracts the human mind. Instead, it loves to get a lot of information all at once, and our world has hijacked this tendency (e.g. social media: videos/podcasts... get ever more shorter, more condensed) - a bit similarly to our propensity to adore very sugary foods.
But there is a beauty, there is a sort of real change of mind, that can only happen by effortful, almost unfun, long processes. It's like you cannot exactly value the landscape on a montain top similarly when you did the painful climbing on your own vs. when you took the car, just quickly snapped a picture with your family and went back home. I have finished books I believed might not have been worth reading till the end, but I realized the struggle to get there, the pain I was trying to get through, was worth having. It's a muscle that needs to be built, although we tend to dislike building it.
On the other hand, if a book is already bad from the beginning: ditch it. Your mind deserves excellent food - and there are so many excellent food for thought out there, it would be a pitty to miss them for lack of time.
Jordan Ellenberg is so underrated. I loved *Shape* and *How Not to be Wrong*. (Both of which I finished!)
I’m surprised at how many book *reviewers* you suggest don’t read the whole book. If you are a reviewer, you have one job, which is to read the whole book, so you can let other people know whether or not they have to, and if they don’t have to, you should let them know which parts they should read, which requires you to have read all the parts.
It would be worth comparing this to academic papers. Most people never get past the abstract, and the ones that do usually don’t finish. There’s a good number of papers where I’ve just dipped into relevant sections without reading from the beginning.
We need to think about how people actually use papers and books, and write them to be used effectively in that way, rather than writing them assuming that most users read from beginning to end.
Hear, hear.
Yes, book reviewers have an obligation to finish the book, and I know from personal experience that they often do not. Unacceptable.
I think readers are making a choice -- and are thus taking some kind of risk -- each time they decide how much of a book to read. If it has a good beginning but gradually turns out to be a crappy one that wastes your time, it would be a loss to spend hours reading it from cover to cover. But if it turns out to have fruitful content throughout the entire book, it would be a loss -- or an incomplete gain at best -- to just read the first chapter and call it a day.
My personal thought is that whatever book it is, it's best to finish the whole thing. Even if it turns out to be crappy, there must be a reason why you think it's crappy, and by exploring that reason you still take away some kind of new knowledge or rediscovery of personal philosophy. This encourages me to finish whatever book I read each time, even if sometimes it takes more time than I expect.
Finished Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell last month. I have to admit I was tempted to give up 200 pages in when little had happened (and so many footnotes.)
Really glad I stuck with it because it is a rare book that you finish and say "sure it was 850 pages, but it could really use another 150 or so to round it out."
I wonder about the breakdown between people who read one book at a time vs the people who read several books simultaneously. I read simultaneously and sometimes I just never get back to one. Sometimes all or nearly all of what I am reading is of the same subject matter. And you wake up one morning and think .... no more Ottoman history for me today. Maybe I get back to the Ottomans later, but maybe not .... I also have a gut feeling that most of the people who finish books aren't highlighting them ... maybe have a poll about that some time?
Yeah, that is my problem too. I have so many books going at once, that I always feel the urge to jump to the next book if the book that I am reading does not captivate me. It is not necessarily bad, however, to read 10% of 10 books rather than 100% of one book. I most often give up when I feel that I have understood the main point of the book.
I love these reflections, Paul. As a nonfiction author, I think there's a communicative obligation to have the important qualifications up front alongside the main idea. (This is one of my complaints about Against Empathy.)
I also tend to conclude my introductory chapters by inviting readers to skip ahead if they get bored or bogged down, and to read the chapters in any order they like, though my guess is that few actually take this advice. It makes sense to write chapters fairly modularly anyway, since few people will remember the details of Chapter 2 by the time they're on Chapter 7.
I know this seems defensive, but I’m surprised by your complaint about AE. God knows there are a lot of reasonable ways to disagree with my views, but I begin the book in an unusual way—much of Chapter 1 responds to criticisms of earlier versions of my view, and so I am (perhaps boringly) careful to be clear about what I mean by empathy, what the scope of my argument is (it applies to morality, not other facets of life), and I even discuss cases where I agree that my argument doesn’t work. Whatever the flaws of AE, I do think that I meet up with the obligation you’re talking about.
It has been a long time, but my experience as a reader was that the book started out seeming very bold but accumulated qualifications along the way, resulting by the end in a more moderate position than I thought was suggested by the beginning.
I seem to remember writing a blog post about the author's obligation to guard carefully against obvious misreadings of their work and using Against Empathy as an example in which those misreadings weren't adequately prevented -- and I seem to recall your replying to that post. Oddly, I can't seem to find that post anymore. Maybe you convinced me I was being unfair and I took it down? The vicissitudes of memory....
Thanks for this post, which I enjoyed and identified with. I found your Substack because I started reading 'Against Empathy' (10% down so far, and it's a good read as well as interesting). I don't know yet whether I'll get to the end: like you, I begin far more non-fiction books than I finish. But there's the difference. I normally read a whole novel because, as you say about films, it's an artistic experience that I value.
Non fiction is different. Then I'm in a conversation with writers. Reading non-fiction nourishes my own thinking – that's why I do it. I can get distracted because an author has given me an idea that I want to go away and play with: that's what you've already done with 'Against Empathy'. I'll read on, but I might get distracted by another thread of thinking. Yesterday I finished a book by Kay Redfield Jamison I began two years ago because the moment to engage with her thinking had returned.
My point here is that there is a fundamental difference between reading as an intellectual practice, developing one's own thinking by engaging with any of the available resources – long books, short books, blog posts, podcasts, magazine articles, academic papers etc. – and reading for pleasure. Both are creative, but only the first requires the reader to engage with and understand the architecture of the whole. Doing that with non-fiction would mean limiting oneself to the tiny proportion of books that even an avid reader like myself can get through in a lifetime. Having studied literature as an undergraduate, it took me years to accept that I didn't have to finish a book just because I have started it. Now, I read in a much more creative way.
PS I found the part of Pierre Bayard's 'How to speak about books you haven't read' very interesting in this respect. It's notable that the French title 'Comment parler des livres que l'on a pas lus?' has a question mark at the end because the book is a philosophical enquiry; the absence of that punctuation mark in the English translation suggests that it was being marketed as a self-help book.
Agreed. One of the most common reactions I have to a non-fiction book I've started is "I'm reading the wrong book!" That is, the book has stirred up an idea or question in me that needs to be investigated first before this book can be profitably engaged with (if I decide to return to it). And that's OK! Or, at least, that's what I think, and since I'm in charge of what I read, what I say goes!
I hardly ever finish a book on kindle. If I like the book, I nearly always go out and buy a physical book, and then finish it on the physical copy. Also, I used to regularly buy cheap audiobooks along with a hard copy, and switch between the two editions to finish. Anyone looking at my listen data, would be totally confused by chapters listened to vs those skipped.
Most of the time I don't think this is a problem.
We can place non-fiction books on a scale from more novel-like cohesive works like biographies, all the way to reference works (dictionaries, encyclopedias) and essay collections by different authors where each chapter can be read in complete isolation from every other. Almost no one is reading the latter cover to cover, and that's fine.
As for popular airport non-fiction books— everyone knows that these books tend to be bloated to round out the expected word count, with the better bits towards the start, so people are going to tend to read until they think they've got the gist.