Some books are long, some books are short. And, if they’re non-fiction books, the shorter, the better. At least for me.
I’ve never thought of books in terms of pages, but it kinda makes sense.
Fergus McCullough started to make a list of the best non-fiction books with less than 250 pages.
- Allen, Global Economic History: A Very Short Introduction (170)
- Bayles, Art & Fear: Observations On the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking (122)
- Caplan, Open Borders (248)
- Carse, Finite and Infinite Games (162)
- Collier, The Bottom Billion (244)
- Cowen, Stubborn Attachments (161); The Great Stagnation (60)
- De Solla Price, Science Since Babylon (240)
- Gibbons, Partition: How and Why Ireland Was Divided (220; h/t Tyler Cowen)
- Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (72)
- Jünger, The Forest Passage (120)
- Karatani, Isonomia and the Origins of Philosophy (176)
- Knight, Chinese Literature: A Very Short Introduction (158)
- Krugman, The Age of Diminished Expectations (244); Pop Internationalism (240)
- Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching (128)
- Machiavelli, The Prince (144)
- Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (184)
- Smil, Oil (219); Energy (210)
- Thiel, Zero to One (210)
- Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization (239)
- Weil, Gravity and Grace (183)
- Wilde, The Critic as Artist (124)
The original article is not online anymore, so I got the full list from archive.org.
Of all these books, the only one I’ve read is Thiel’s Zero to One, so it’s a good list to start with.
Oh, and apparently there’s a reason why some books are bigger than they should: having a bigger spine allows them to stand out in a bookshop. Or that was the thing in 2006.
via Tyler Cowen
