The Big Think

The year comes to an end and I’ve clocked in 47 books. I just finished the last one a few minutes ago.

# of Books: 47
# of Pages Read: 13291
Average pages/book: 283
Shortest Book: 80
Longest Book: 1152

Stats since 4/1/01 (when I started counting):

# of books: 266
# of pages: 89107
Averages pages: 335
Shortest Book: 60
Longest Book: 1152

If you assume that I started reading 30 years ago and have kept the same general pace, somewhere in the past year I read my one-thousandth book. Pretty cool. I wish I had known which one it was. Hopefully something classic like Anthem or Cryptonomicon and not something like Air Tools: How to Maintain Your Tools.

It’s an interesting little habit I have of writing down all my books and pages. Doesn’t take very long, and it reinforces to me how many books are in the average small town library, or even the average Barnes and Noble. It would take dozens of lifetimes to get through a respectable fraction of them, and those collections represent pretty much just the most popular or in demand books of the past decade or so. There have been millions of books published in just the last decade alone. How is one supposed to keep up?

Years ago I read a science fiction story about a device that allowed you to “read” (absorb, really) a book by holding a small square cube that contained the “book” next to your head for a few seconds. You could plow through several books in a day. Unfortunately, reading more than one or two per day (a process that took only seconds) ran the risk of permanent psychosis. Hmm… good thing that little device doesn’t exist now, or I might be tempted. People probably already think I’m a little crazy for keeping track.