TL;DR: Why it’s okay to skip to the good part while reading

Nikesh Arora's take on skimming books sparked debate, questioning the value of time spent on mediocre reads in today's content-saturated world

For once, we’re siding with a CEO dude-bro. Nikesh Arora, head of the cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks, recently admitted that he doesn’t read entire books. He just skims the summary. “Why would I read 500 pages to distil 10?” he asked. It was a statement designed to trigger Book Twitter. And it did. Users called him lazy, anti-intellectual, and everything wrong with hustle culture. But hear us out... he’s not entirely wrong.

Everyone from reality stars to retired talk show hosts is peddling their self-help memoirs. Yawn! (SHUTTERSTOCK)

Think about the last book you genuinely regretted finishing. The one with clunky prose and one-dimensional characters, or that murder mystery you solved before Chapter 3. That wasn’t just ₹300 down the drain, it was hours of your life. Time that could have been spent on a nap, therapy, or a nice spell of doomscrolling.

Let’s be real: Not every book deserves our time. Some don’t even deserve a print run. For every raw, well-written memoir such as Jennette McCurdy’s I’m Glad My Mom Died, or Andre Agassi’s Open, there are a dozen “my journey” snoozefests. Celebs, sportspersons, that one guy in that one show 10 years ago, fitness influencers, washed-up reality stars, retired talk-show hosts… everyone’s written a What Life Taught Me (After I Got Rich) book. Influencers are writing romances (shoutout to Prajakta Koli, who thanked ChatGPT in her end note). MBA grads are working the next Shiva Trilogy-type pop mythology series. As for rich folks who cannot write, they’re writing children’s books.

Most self-help books could have been a TED Talk – or better yet, a tweet. (SHUTTERSTOCK)

If publishing feels algorithmic, it’s because it now is. Some books exist only because their authors went viral once and got a book deal (Remember Milk and Honey, and the free-verse trend it spawned?) and publishers love throwing money at a proven formula. So, for every #Girlboss (Sophia Amoruso), there’s a Lean In (Sheryl Sandberg); for every A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J Maas, there’s a trail of horny medieval romantasies with Thorns, Shadows and Crowns in the title.

Did we really need to suffer through an entire Colleen Hoover novel just to understand all those It Ends With Us memes and the still-dragging-on Blake-Baldoni fiasco? Even Liane Moriarty’s richly detailed posh-crime novels are being bleached into crowdpleasing series these days. So, why shame readers for skimming through middling books?

But perhaps the worst offenders are in the self-help aisle. Every CEO and startup bro believes they’ve found 10/30/99 mantras of life/love/success. And everyone titles it The Art of This, The Laws of That, The Power of Something or the Other. Most could have been a TED Talk – or better yet, a tweet. Even the authors know this. That’s why James Clear puts summaries at the end of each chapter of his Atomic Habits. There’s even a cheat sheet on his website.

Of course, some books do deserve slow reading. With some stories, the writing is the point. Some ideas need space to breathe. But in an age of endless content, limited time, and a ginormous TBR pile, maybe it’s okay to be ruthless. We’ve been SparkNoting Shakespeare and Wikipedia-scrolling Dostoevsky for years. No one complained then. So why now? Skim the book if you must. Chances are, the author did too.

From HT Brunch, July 05, 2025

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