I’m not a particularly fast reader, nor do I have a lot of free time right now, which means I ultimately don’t read very many books these days. While this isn’t inherently a problem for me, I gather that many people I want to interact with use the books one’s read as a proxy for their intelligence. In this context I think the goal of any reader should be to maximize their social value while minimizing their effort. We should read the smallest books with the greatest cultural significance; books with higher ratings and fewer pages:
I’ve made it a point in recent years to read as many of the shorter classics as I can. Whenever I finish another book, the question crosses my mind “which book can I finish the fastest that will get me the most social value at the water cooler?” Instead of asking my friends for the shortest book on their shelf and giving away the whole illusion, I decided to take an empirical approach to choosing my next books. Clearly, the best books will be those which, for a given page length, have the highest public perception.
Mathematically speaking, any book which has a lower rating than one of equal or larger size is thus dominated by the shorter book; entirely unworth reading. The set of all non-dominated points in a multi-objective function is called the Pareto front, and this is where the shortest, best books will lie.
To actually get a list of these books I found a reasonably sane Books That Everyone Should Read At Least Once list and scraped the data. Below are the suggestions from that list with their respective qualtiy ratings and page lengths. Hover over the bubbles to see their details.
Good Books by Length and Rating
The message here is clear. Read anything written by J.K. Rowling and Dr. Seuss. And at all costs avoid picking up The Scarlet Letter or Moby Dick.
The full list of books, with their page lengths and ratings are listed below. Click the title to see more about the book. The Pareto front is underlined.