michael_nielsen

Are books for memorising things? Aren't they already far better at that than their readers? Each (good) book has a purpose that isn't memorisation, and for each purpose there is a right length.

I agree. But it’s a false dichotomy to suppose that memory and understanding are completely different things. In many cases they’re closely related.

Makes me wonder if it’s in fact unwise to put down repetitive books without finishing them, despite thinking that you’ve got the gist.

I used to notice this when I read the paper on which a book was based - I always remembered far more from the book. It was this observation that prompted my original tweet.

I often find economics books overly long with lots of repetition (e.g Piketty, Gordon's Rise and Fall). It's never been clear to me if this is a style or if there's a deeper reason for it

For Gordon I suspect different people have very different standards for what it means to understand something. He wrote it to a quite exacting standard; many of his readers would have been satisfied with a much less exacting standard.

The 48 Laws of Power is a pretty good example of a book that uses the long-form well. Readers can skip to each chapter to get the underlying principle and then, if they want, they can read the historical example that illustrates the principle.