A lifetime of reading

/ Seonaid

Recently, I happened to score a job taking inventory while working at a very small library. It turned out that “my” library contained approximately the number of books I have read in my lifetime. [FN] So, here it is, a lifetime of reading, gathered together in one place:

Now, this in no way reflects my actual reading practices. My own library leans heavily towards the non-fiction section. In fact, when I reviewed the Adult Fiction section one day, I only found two books that I had read before I came here. But that is a discussion for another day.

FN: I recently ran the numbers on how many books I have read over the years. It went something like this: I started reading when I was about 4, so I’ve got about 35 years behind me. We’ll say 3 books a week for 35 years to compensate for the times of my life when I was reading a book a day and times that I was down to one every couple of weeks. There was a long lull in novels and complete books when I was in university, but I was reading several hundred pages of other materials, so we’ll allow that as “books”. In the end I come to a rough estimate of 5000 books (give or take 500) so far.

 

3 thoughts on “A lifetime of reading”

  1. This is so weird. Yesterday, I was actually trying to count up the number of books I might have read in my life. And here you are doing the same thing … I do, however, read a TON of fiction. And I never stopped reading novels even when immersed in Microeconomics and Life Contingencies and History of Modern Art and other such required reading. But what about you? The Left Hand of Darkness, and all that?

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