- cross-posted to:
- memes@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- memes@lemmy.ml
You must log in or register to comment.
That means I would have to go to the library to borrow books I want to read and then really read them and turn them back in. I just want to buy books to sit on the shelf as I tell myself I will read them someday in the future.
Or… what if you do both…
I would hit the 30 limit so quick lol. Well I am past it
Laughs in research library
How do I actually read more? Like how do force myself to read a book. I have some cool books I’d like to read but it’s hard to choose it over say a video game. I also have ADHD.
I got a kindle for Christmas and have read more in the last few months than in the last decade. I think it being a screen kinda helps, and also being able to download books instantly instead of having to go to the library or a bookstore.
Best way is to time box it, especially if you’re not accustomed to reading for long periods of time. You could start by carving out just 30 minutes of focused reading before you let yourself get into gaming sessions, which will give you a sense of when you start to feel fatigued (you may end up wanting to read longer). For me, making it a mission helps me focus better at least
Godamn, I feel bad about the one book I’m reading on top of the next book “I may or may not read.”
You can pry the books I never read out my cold dead hands!
(Feel free to suggest me some public domain books I can get from Gutenberg, maybe I will read them)
But… Stephen King alone has written 65 novels…
That he remembers writing between all the coke he did
I’ve seen interviews with him where he mentioned: ‘I was reading a synopsis of a story that sounded really interesting’ only to discover that it was about a book that he had written. And apparently he has no memory of writing Cujo.
There’s ‘doing coke’ and ‘doing coke so much I forgot I wrote a fucking best selling novel’.
I read one of his short stories recently that followed one of the characters whose child died in Cujo. I love the idea of Stephen King completely forgetting he wrote that book and having to go back and read it to come up with characters for his later stories. Do you suppose while reading he was like “Damn this book is great, I wonder what’ll happen next?”
Anyone else have a redneck family that started dropping off endless truckloads of random used books from various flea markets at your home the very moment they found out that you like to read?
My parents sort of did this to me for a while… I did get some books I ended up really liking this way but we also lived way out in the country so getting to a library was difficult. Didn’t have much choice but to try them.
But then they realized I was well beyond kids/young adult books and started giving me books they liked when I was in 5th grade, like sphere and the third pandemic… my teachers thought it was super weird, and I got a lot of negative comments about age appropriate-ness, but I had a dictionary and undiagnosed autism (diagnosed adhd, though), it was fine.
I was so excited when we moved and I was walking distance from a library. I ended up getting 2 library cards so I could reserve a bunch of stuff and still check out 5 at a time (I was there usually twice a week, and would just burn through books at around 1,000 pages a day, because it was all I ever did)
It’s not that I’m not appreciative, it’s just that a 40+ year old man like myself can handle only so many Julia Quinn, Emma Chase, and Tessa Dare books
No but that sounds fucked up. A book collection should be a carefully curated catalog full of things that you personally love or find great use for, not some sad eclectic mix that looks like a hoarder’s pile.
Unless you have a giant library to fill
Thats so cruel. When I mention I like to read my family drops off endless amounts of books at my doorstep.
Two copies of “Heading home with your newborn”?
They must have had twins.
Bang ! BOOM! CRASH!!
Dog jumps out of bed and runs into the other room
Me: sorry doggo I was trying to get a drink of water, get back in bed
Doggo: why you do all that noises you fool
I find this attitude chilling.
Right? That level of control seems downright psychotic.
“Throw out stuff so you can buy more” – Maria Kondo
Miss me with that braindead shit.
She doesn’t even follow her own system anymore because she had kids and her system doesn’t work well for families she admits.
If you have more books than bookshelfspace, then than tells me we will be friends.
Less than 30? That woman is goofy.
When we moved in, the neighbors daughter was curious about the “new ones”, and asked if she could help.
I told her that I would be putting the books on the shelves the next day, and she promised to come over.
I don’t know what she expected (when we visited them, I never saw a book in their place), but she was shocked when she saw a large pile of boxes. I had just finished installing the first wall of shelves, and told her that we would have to sort the boxes out, only about 10k books were for the living room, the other would go up into the studio…
There’s having 30 books, and 10.000 books. There’s probably a sweet spot somewhere in the middle. No one needs 10.000 books.
That reminds me of the section in Black Swan where Taleb talks about Umberto Eco’s library:
“The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?” and the others — a very small minority — who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.”
Some people read a hundred books in their lifetime and keep 30. The 10k books on those shelves only represent a small part of what I have read in my lifetime.
“As a teenager.”
That’s an impressive claim, but let’s break down the math here. To read 10,000 books in your lifetime (that you claim is only a small part of books read), you’d need to maintain an absolutely relentless pace that borders on the impossible.
Let’s assume a typical book averages around 70,000 words (roughly 200-300 pages). The average adult reads at about 238 words per minute, which means ech book would take approximately 5 hours of pure reading time. Multiply that by 10,000 books and you’re looking at 50,000 hours of reading - that’s equivalent to working a full-time job for 24 years straight, doing nothing but reading.
Even if we’re generous and assume you started reading seriously at age 10 and are now 70, that’s 60 years of reading. To hit 10,000 books, you’d need to finish 167 books per year, or more than 3 books every single week for six decades. That means spending roughly 15 hours per week reading - every week, no breaks, no vacations, no life getting in the way.
The assumptions get even more problematic when you consider that this pace would need to be maintained through your childhood, school years, career building, relationships, and all of life’s other demands. Most voracious readers I know average 50-100 books per year at their peak, and even that requires significant dedication.
For context, if you read one book per week for 50 years you’d reach about 2,600 books. Impressive, but nowhere near 10,000. Your claim would require either superhuman reading speed, an unusually broad definition of what counts as a “book,” or some serious exaggeration. The math just doesn’t add up for a realistic human lifestyle.
Lucky me has been a speed reader basically from the start. I cannot imagine how painfully slow 238 words per minute must feel. The brain has probably forgotten half of the story when the reader reaches the end of a book weeks later. As a teenager, I already read about five books a day. Autism has its advantages…
Theodore Roosevelt could read several hundred page books every night in a few hours and have all the information on total recall …from what I’ve read. Apparently he would impress world leaders by studying their entire culture before meeting and it allowed him to deeply connect with them. My grandfather was the same way.
I wish I was that lucky but my brain doesn’t work like that
The fastest 5% of readers can hit around 700-1000 words per minute, and if you’re autistic with hyperlexia, you can process text at extremely fast speeds using both brain hemispheres simultaneously. The average novel is about 90,000 words, so at 1000 wpm that’s 90 minutes per book, meaning 5 books would take you 7.5 hours of reading daily. More realistically at 700 wpm, you’re looking at 10.7 hours per day.
If you can sustain 5 books per day, that’s 1,825 books per year. To reach 20,000 books, you’d need about 11 years of consistent daily reading. The math becomes even more favorable when you consider shorter works like romance novels (89,000 words), young adult books (50,000-80,000 words), and short story collections (30,000 words).
If you started this pace in your teens and you’re now middle-aged, that’s 2-3 decades of reading time. At 1,825 books per year, you could hit 36,500-54,750 books over 20-30 years. So your claim of tens of thousands of books isn’t mathematically impossible, especially with the neurological advantages that come with hyperlexia. The math works if you’re an absolute machine with enhanced reading processing abilities and the dedication to treat reading like a full-time job for decades.
Still off. I’m faster, and I’m older.
That means you’re the top 1% of the world, essentially, or even higher. Unlikely but not impossible, some of the fastest in the world read between 2,000-4,000 wpm.
I wasn’t guessing your age though, it was merely part of the calculation. If you’re older it just means you had even more time to read impressive numbers of books.
I am by no means a speed reader, but even I think 238 words a minute is painfully slow!
It is pretty slow, I do about 450 a minute, though I do love reading.
There are too many alarming assumptions in your scenario.
Given their claim I would assume @Treczoks@lemmy.world will have a much faster reading speed.
Their collection quite likely contains shorter genres (novellas, plays, poetry) and might also contain fast reads (trashy fiction, collections they were published in themselves and skim read the rest to be polite, etc).
I indeed have a faster reading speed. I intentionally switched to English for reading (not my native language) to slow down the reading speed.
But I rarely read novellas or plays - I prefer proper books. When I was a kid, of course I read childrens books which were absolute quickies. But I did not include them in my count.
I can easily read The Lord of the Rings between lunch and dinner, and still enjoy Tolkiens play with languages, or tell you where to find a specific scene.
You are very very fast!
I encourage you to read more novellas! Some really great writing is in them. For example One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Metamorphosis, Animal Farm, I Am Legend, War of the Worlds, The Time Machine, Ah Q, Heart of Darkness, A Clockwork Orange, The Third Man, and many many non-famous ones, like ZOMBIE by Joyce Carol Oates.
I’ve already read more than half of those.
If you should keep one thing in life it’s books.
