📓 Cabinet of Ideas - Spring 2025

In Praise of the Hundred Page Idea – Tracy Durnell's Mind Garden

In praise of the hundred page idea – Tracy Durnell’s Mind Garden #

Excerpt #

(Ed. note: hello Hacker News folks! Since you may be new to my work, I wanted to provide a bit of context; for more of my thoughts on reading, please see My Reading Philosophy in 17 Guidelines)

cat sniffing a handful of slim volumes

a handful of hundredish page ideas from my collection

(Ed. note: hello Hacker News folks! Since you may be new to my work, I wanted to provide a bit of context; for more of my thoughts on reading, please see My Reading Philosophy in 17 Guidelines)

I prefer a lightweight nonfiction book to a detailed tome. I’m a dilettante of many interests, so my attention for any given topic is more likely to sustain 100 pages than 600. The sweet spot is longer than a longread internet article, but that doesn’t demand a months-long commitment: a 2-3 hour text.

At about 100 pages, the idea must be substantial, but not substantiated to death. There’s room to fully explain one idea, but not enough to get lost in tangents. This is manifesto territory; far from being forgettable for being short, their intensity makes them more powerful. A single idea, distilled.

Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny is an eminently reasonable 127 pages; I read the graphic version, and it’s one of the most valuable works I’ve read in the past decade. (Unfortunately 😬) The 72-page 2k to 10k by Rachel Aaron also punches above its class in terms of impact — it made me change the way I write. Strunk and White’s svelte Elements of Style is a classic over a hundred years later. I appreciate an author’s restraint, when they can value a gem of an idea and recognize how to present it simply, without elaborate fittings.

Some ideas warrant 300 pages. A very few justify 600. But many 100-page ideas are bloated into the 300-page form factor — from my understanding (which may well be wrong), because Americans want to feel like we’ve gotten our money’s worth? Perhaps this desire for brevity makes me sound unfocused, but the seeming depth of a 300-pager is often illusory. I suspect I’m not the only one who’d like more 100-page ideas without the padding.

The other thing that happens with hundred -page ideas is packaging them up with a bunch of smaller ones in an essay collection. I’d rather have a single meatier essay in a slim volume than several jammed together in a thicker book. “Here’s that one essay you want to read and five others you’ve never heard of!” As if I didn’t already have enough things to read — it’s like the free bag that companies throw in to online orders once you’ve spent enough — can I pay you more to keep the damn tote, of which I already possess more than I need for a lifetime, and not burden me with your unwanted brandware? A bouquet benefits from filler; an idea does not.

Part of why I dislike essay collections is their neverendingness; I’ll read two, three, four essays in a volume and I still can’t cross it off my list. An incomplete task, it becomes a mental weight, an obligation. I’m deprived of the satisfaction of finishing.

Binding essays as one implies that they are of a kind, when so often they are not. This detracts from the essays I do read from a volume, diminishing them as incomplete ideas in the context of their placement. Or the format invites me to treat it as a sampler, an amuse-bouche of 30-minute ideas, and since I think of it as the type of book to read an essay in one sitting, I never get around to reading the longest (and probably most valuable) essay in the bunch.

This shorter form factor does exist, but seems more limited in number (or I’m bad at finding them 😅). Two works I’ve recently picked up from 1973 fit the bill: Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text, at an idyllic 67 pages, and Illich’s Tools for Conviviality, at 110. The more recent Care Manifesto lands at 114 pages. I’m very much looking forward to reading Robin Wall Kimmerer’s The Serviceberry, 128 pages, which I assume is expanded from her spectacular essay that I read last year.

Some other short nonfiction I’ve read in the past few years:

I regard long books, both fiction and nonfiction, with a bit of an economist’s eye: are the ideas in the 600-page book that much better than those in 300- or 100- page books, such that the opportunity cost is worth trading six 100-page ideas for a single 600-pager? My reading time is limited and since I’m not an academic, I don’t need works so referenced that the footnotes run to a hundred pages themselves. For me, the value in ideas is connection and synthesis: it’s more useful to my type of thinking to have a slightly shallower understanding of more ideas, so I can build a mental web between all of them.

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