Writing Books That Are Hard to Review
We need more texts that oppose being skimmed.
Nassim Taleb, one of my favorite authors, said that when he was writing his book Antifragile, he deliberately structured it in a way that makes it hostile to reviewers. Most reviewers would skim the book to write a review article, so Taleb wrote it in a way that makes it difficult to skim without reading it. One of the chapters is called “The Cat and the Washing Machine.” Another chapter is called “The Souk and the Office Building.” Going through the table of contents won’t help much in understanding what the book is about.
I believe the meaning behind such a move is to invite the reader to a deeper engagement with the text. It is not just a bold, edgy thing to do; it signals that, in an era of superficial and quick consumption, you offer the reader something that is actually worth their time, thus not allowing them to just skim over it. It is not just a demand on the reader, but also taking up the responsibility of producing something so good that the reader would not want to skim.
If you’re asking something significant from your readers, then you, as an author, are equally bound to deliver something of equal value. It’s not just about withholding the ability to skim; it’s about ensuring that your content rewards the reader for their effort. The demand for deep reading creates a reciprocal demand for high-quality writing.
Consider this: if something can be explained in 10 pages, it should not be stretched into 50 pages. It is not that people don’t want to read long texts or don’t have good attention spans. I believe the quantity of content available to us is so vast that people would skip to the next thing if it is not of value to them. Therefore, long writing still works, and there are plenty of readers for it, but it needs to have the substance which justifies its length.
If an idea truly takes 50 pages to fully develop, then the content should be so rich and nuanced that it defies simplification. Good writing follows this principle, demanding that the reader dig in and work through the material because there’s no other way to grasp it. In return for this effort, the reader gets a text full of meaning and richness on every page.
Writing in a way that is hard to skim is not just a stylistic choice; it’s a call for higher standards in both reading and writing.
This approach is radically different from much of today’s literature, which often caters to a skimming culture. Many books are written in a way that if you distilled their main ideas into bullet points, not much would be lost. They may aim to please a broad audience quickly, but this often comes at the cost of depth.
Francis Bacon famously said, “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.”
What we need is more books that are to be chewed and digested.
In essence, writing that cannot be reviewed by skimming is about respect. It’s respect for the complexity of ideas and for the reader’s intellectual curiosity. But it’s also about respecting the craft of writing itself.
Hi 👋 I’m Sameer. Long-form writer specializing in human-centric content.
I couldn't agree more. There's a lot of value, for example, in short stories. But we need to stop dumbing down content just because people's attention spans are short. I can tell when an author is being condescending, and it bothers me to no end.