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How Many Books Will You Read in a Lifetime? Around 4600, If You Read Fast (ft.com)
I once sneered at lifetime reading plans. Two decades later, I'm more aware that reading time, like all time, is precious, writes journalist Nilanjana Roy. From her column on the Financial Times (might be paywalled), shared by a reader: As the new year approaches, I sort my bookshelves and reboot my lifetime reading plan. Like a good road map, the plan makes the difference between dreaming of visiting 50 places before you die, and actually getting to 10 or 11 of those in the year ahead. In my twenties, arrogant with the faith of a speed-reader who had plunged recklessly into reading the classics of Bengali and Hindi literature alongside English, I sneered at lifetime reading plans. So earnest. So stuffy. Who wanted a map when you could freewheel down the highway, veering from JM Coetzee to Ursula K Le Guin, reading Stephen King alongside Beowulf or The Mahabharata, reading Tamil pulp fiction in translation one week, Japanese crime thrillers the next? Two decades later, I'm more aware that the years pass swiftly, that reading time, like all time, is precious. In a thoughtfully planned survey for Literary Hub, writer Emily Temple plotted the number of books an average reader in the US might finish in a lifetime. She analysed trends for women and men across different age groups, and broke down the results into three categories: the average reader (about 12 books a year), the voracious reader (50 books a year) and the super reader (80 books a year). At the age of 25, even a super reader with a long life expectancy will finish a mere 4,560-4,880 books before they die.
I'd like to know what they were smoking when they said the average reader reads 12 books a year. How many people read even one?
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
I count Goodnight Moon as one of the books I've read. Sure, it's shorter than the Silmarillion, but I've also read it 20 times to my kids. If you read a bedtime story per night to your kids, and have a well-stocked public library nearby, you can easily read 150 new books per year for a while.
I prefer reading stupid Slashdot comments!
over the last 3 years my count is like 125... And I've read like that since I was a kid... MANY decades ago.
That doesn't count the magazine (dead tree and electronic), technical articles, manuals for work and email lists I subscribe to.
And, yes, I do other things too.
I do NOT sit, drink beer and cheer clods smashing one another on large publicly funded grass fields or chasing small white balls through grassy parks.
I do throw heavy balls at harmless pins just to watch them fall down in fear and hysterical laughter. Sometimes I even manage to hit them.
If you're a parent, it's a book you have to read.
Even better when Samuel L. Jackson reads it : https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Most of them science fiction first editions.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Could you please recommend some?
...a new category above "super."
When I was a kid, I used to go to the library every week, checking out a book a day. By age 35, I had a library of over 4000 books. I read all of them. That's about 2.5 books a week, just for the ones I owned. I've slowed down a lot in my later years, only finishing two to three novels a week on the average. I've read at least 6,000 books in my lifetime, probably closer to 8,000.
I'm nowhere near the most obsessive reader I know of. I've had middle-aged friends who had libraries that literally filled houses, and they read all of those books. Forty or fifty years of reading a book (or two!) per day adds up: Fifteen thousand? Twenty?. Some of them either worked at or owned used books stores just to feed their reading habit.
When I donated all my paper books after I got my first kindle, I counted around 4400 paper books. My back hurt for 2 weeks.
Plus I got a new empty room.
Recreational reading is the one thing I don't plan. My reading list consists of whatever strikes my fancy at the library or bookstore.
Books I've bought but haven't read yet may constitute some sort of plan (as in 'I plan to read these on my next vacation'), but I'm not going to work my way down a list of 'books I should read before I die'.
I used to read Slashdot a LOT. I cut my Slashdot time in half and used that time to read for school (WGU). I got my degree mostly in the time I used to be on Slashdot. Soon I'll start my masters from Georgia Tech online.
I'd like to know what they were smoking when they said the average reader reads 12 books a year. How many people read even one?
Very likely that statistics is hiding reality here. If most people read 0-2 books per year, but a small but not insignificant amount of people read 50 books per year, the average will be 12.
Plateau determined by your own fatigue, by realization that books are repetitive, by lower sognal to noise ratio comes earlier.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
I sneered at lifetime reading plans. So earnest. So stuffy. {...} Two decades later, I'm more aware that the years pass swiftly, that reading time, like all time, is precious.
Not following her reasoning here. Feeling the preciousness of time more acutely as you age, sure. But how does that change whether a "lifetime reading plan" makes any sense?
Is there some exam in the afterlife that she needs to prepare for?
That's how it strikes me as well. I read about three books a week; and I feel like I'm slacking. When I was younger (as in, about 40 years ago when I was 20 or so) I easily read one a day. Lately, that's rare. I'm re-reading David Wingrove's Chung Kuo now, and those are going more-or-less at about 2/days per volume, barring interruptions like Festivus and Saturnalia. :)
But my life is much more demanding now. I just don't have the time to read like I did when I was a young man. I would like to have the time, but it's just not in the cards. People depend on me — what I want as compared to what I must do have diverged a bit.
I do know some folks who, according to them, "don't read books." They do speak of it as if it's some kind of chore. I don't understand why, but honestly... I don't think I want to understand why.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Wasn't a chore for me at all. It was like a bright light shining on the mysteries of the world for non-fiction, and an infinite stage for fiction, one far superior to the movies or television. Your experience was apparently different. And no, I still don't understand it.
Books are easily obtainable. Libraries are everywhere, including in most schools. Schools put them right in front of student's faces in classes. They're chock full of information and entertainment.
If that doesn't appeal, okay, but still, it's just a bunch of WTF to me.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Hardly surprising, given the American education establishment's devotion to the "whole word" approach to teaching new readers.
Precisely.
I'm over 4X the "lifetime number", and my average is a book a day. This does not include any reading I do online, it counts only physical books, most of which are in various rooms throughout my house (or in many, many boxes).
If you lean "whole word", you do not recognize written versions of words you use in every day speech, if you've never been taught them, nor can you speak words which you've only ever encountered in written form.
This is a necessary consequence of learning words as ideograms, rather than phonectically, as syllables.
“The Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World” by haruki murakami
“War and Peace” in the modern Peavar translation
“Lolita” and “Pnin” by Nabokov
“The Death of Ivan ilyich” by Tolstoi
“Maus” by Art Spiegelman
“My Dog Stupid” by John Fante
“LA confidential” by James Elroy
“Blindsight” by Peter Watts for cutting edge SF
Etc. So much good stuff, so little time
Lemme see, when I was in college in the 60s I was able to earn a Masters degree in Electrical Engineering with a decent GPA at the same time I was reading one to two SF paperbacks a day depending more on availability than time. So that's at least 400 a year. The collection I had before a water leak killed off about half it it was about 200' of paperback books, 95% of which I had already read. At about 1/2" per book that's about 4800 books. And then I had another about 1000 that were used to prop up the second row of books so I could see enough of their spines to read the titles. I'd slowed down reading somewhat when I got a day job and was married. These days I am picking up my reading again. Lemme see - about 20 books in the last four weeks. Retirement's great in that respect.
And based on friends I have at LASFS I'm no super hero level reader. Whereinheck did this "scholarly person", Nilanjana Roy, get her numbers? Did she pick them out of her nose?
{^_^}
I wonder how much a difference reading speed is. I have read Dune quite a few times, and I don't think it's ever taken me close to hours. I tend to average about 100 pages per hour, varying a bit depending on how relaxed or distracted I am. If I spend 1 hour a day reading (which I usually do before I go to sleep), then I finish one 400-page book every 4 days, so about 90 a year if I don't read at any other time. My mother reads faster than me and will happily read one or two books a day. My father reads a lot more slowly and can take a month to finish a novel.
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Harvard is accredited by The New England Association of Schools and Colleges'. Stanford is accredited by Western Association of Schools and Colleges. WGU has been accredited by BOTH.
It's also a state university in several states, like University of Texas, UCLA, etc.
I probably wouldn't pursue a college degree (from anywhere) unless you wanted a college degree, and the salary increase that normally comes with that. In the WGU case, it also includes industry certifications from Cisco, Microsoft, etc. If you want to learn for your own pleasure AND have the self-discipline to do it, school doesn't offer that much more than you could do reading on the internet.
In that regard WGU, is a better value than most schools because the $6,000 tuition ($4,500 after tax credit) includes high-quality content from Cisco and others than people not in school do choose to pay for from their own pocket, and includes certifications which would otherwise be expensive. Some people do some studying before enrolling in WGU, then spend a year at WGU to get their degree. So they get all their certifications, and curriculum to learn the certification material, plus the degree itself, for $6,000. That's not bad.
Curriculum quality varies at WGU. Some isn't great, some is. Overall, I think it's an excellent value. Before I graduated, the certifications alone increased my income by more than the tuition cost, so the schooling literally paid for itself, while I was still in school.
I'm not following the link, but I assume that's Go the F*ck to Sleep. Someone gave us a copy, and it's an amusing book. Then my kids found it, and begged me to read it to them. I made it a challenge to try to insert kid-friendly language on the fly while reading, just to keep it interesting.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
My my younger kids, in their 30's, have probably read more than that. My personal library - the sf&f, and that's books in the bookcases in the family room - are closer to 4,000 than 3,000, and there may be 15 or 20 that my late wife read that I didn't care for, and a good number I've read multiple times.
And no, I don't speed read - from what I've read, you miss a lot of what they're saying in content that needs to be thought about. I do read about 250 wpm, though.
So, jeez, if you're talking about 60 years of reading, 4600 isn't even 100/yr. Of course, I read the average American reads about 3 - that's THREE - books a year, so between my family and friends, there are thousands of Americans who don't read one book a year.
And you want to work with these people? Or they think they should vote?
Justin Cronin "The Passage" (three book series)
-- Great sci-fi spanning a couple generations, it's a horror / apocalyptic setting.
Clair North "The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August"
-- I thought this was a unique take on immortality
Guillermo del Toro "The Strain" (three book series)
-- another sci-fi / horror / apocalypse book with an interesting take on vampires. The FX network made a good series out of this.
Cheap storage VM.
The Economist doesn't publish 30-page articles, though I know what you mean. Sometimes a feature topic is fairly bulky.
I read roughly one heavy, non-fiction book a week from the local library. If a book doesn't force me to slow my reading speed down to Big Think, I soon toss it aside.
Chapter one, paragraph one of Tim O'Reilly's What's the Future (2017):
I'm sure as hell not fully adjusting my giant mental map of reality at 1000 words/minute. I can cruise along at 600 WPM on fairly heavy material and not miss the arrival of something worth reading properly. Once good fortune arrives, then my preferred reading speed is 200 WPM at 200% comprehension, or 100 WPM at 300% comprehension (the one true goal of reading is to comprehend more than the writer delivered; all of the best writers have a giant multiplier effect).
If the purpose of writing is to create a context in which the reader can think, then reading is the process of fully entering into that context with your own mind. This simply can not be done at 1000 WPM. That's the reading speed of a future Jeopardy champion. (There's a damn good reason why IBM's robot has already won.)
Speed Reading Promises Are Too Good to Be True, Scientists Find — January 2016
That one guy from my high school who could achieve 85% comprehension at 1000 WPM was pretty much a know-it-all to begin with (actual rocket-scientist father, older brother 1600 SAT score & Caltech admission). He was mainly just slotting minor facts into a large, shallow matrix of what he already knew. What a great use of time.
By far the largest multiplier on my own reading efficiency is careful selection of source materials, and curating reading contexts where the different books and articles read in the same week spark off each other in interesting and useful ways (sometimes grouping like with like, other times grouping polar opposites).
My gut estimate is that I read about 150,000 words per day of organized language (a metric which excludes most Slashdot story submissions, and most recipe websites). That works out to about four hours at my standard reconnaissance speed of 600 WPM.
I probably have my eyes oriented toward text for twelve hours on any busy day, or about 3500 hours per year (since I turned ten). Let's just call it 150,000 hours, which works out to perhaps 5 billion total words impinging on my consciousness in some small way.
Thus I have mastered the skill of reading at 100 WPM with 300% comprehension.
Final thought:
If a website tells you that something was posted "11 months ago" it's pretty much guaranteeing that the content is not worth revisiting 11 months hence.
The recent shift from absolution time (e.g. "January 2016") to relative time (e.g. "two years ago") correlates with fly-by-night reading skills.