I am no reader
I have this impression of myself as someone deeply invested in the value of literature. I quit my (more lucrative) job as a programmer to return to the world of books. I haven't been without a book - often two or three at a time - since the age of 11. I read when I walk. I read in the tub. I read on the plane. I have been known - don't tell the CHP - to read at stoplights when I'm driving.
But I am no reader, it turns out.
A good sized novel takes me between a week and two weeks to get through, often in stolen moments between other tasks. Let's be generous and call it a week per. That's 52 books a year, or 1,560 in the time I've been an active reader. Certainly there's plenty of other, smaller reading material tossed in there, but the measure isn't going to be much north of that figure.
My wife, The Smartest Person in the World, recently emailed her mother her LibraryThing wishlist, so that she could be on the lookout for any titles which might pop up at book sales. Or, rather, that's what she thought she did...it turns out Librarything's user-unfriendly interface exported the wrog file, and what my mother-in-law got instead was a printout of every book Michele has read in the past 3 and 1/2 years.
40 books per page.
42 pages long.
Do you get that? In the time I might have read, tops, 200 books, my wife consumed 1,680 novels. More books than I've read *in My Entire LIFE!* She averages almost a book-and-a-half PER DAY. I'm not even sure that's "reading" any more. She's devouring. She's inhaling. She is a book glutton.
Desperately I ploughed through the list, hoping maybe there were a bunch of repeats, or these were short stories or something. No dice. I'd read about 10% of the titles in that list, and I recognized many of them from seeing her walking about with them.
She waved her hand at the list. "Oh, that's different," she demured. "It's not like I remember most of those. They're just, you know, a quick distraction."
At random, I named three titles. She gave me point-by-point plot summaries, character names, and then launched into a discussion of their relative stylistic merits and possible metaphoric relationships both to their genre politics and didactic elements.
Holy crap.
But I am no reader, it turns out.
A good sized novel takes me between a week and two weeks to get through, often in stolen moments between other tasks. Let's be generous and call it a week per. That's 52 books a year, or 1,560 in the time I've been an active reader. Certainly there's plenty of other, smaller reading material tossed in there, but the measure isn't going to be much north of that figure.
My wife, The Smartest Person in the World, recently emailed her mother her LibraryThing wishlist, so that she could be on the lookout for any titles which might pop up at book sales. Or, rather, that's what she thought she did...it turns out Librarything's user-unfriendly interface exported the wrog file, and what my mother-in-law got instead was a printout of every book Michele has read in the past 3 and 1/2 years.
40 books per page.
42 pages long.
Do you get that? In the time I might have read, tops, 200 books, my wife consumed 1,680 novels. More books than I've read *in My Entire LIFE!* She averages almost a book-and-a-half PER DAY. I'm not even sure that's "reading" any more. She's devouring. She's inhaling. She is a book glutton.
Desperately I ploughed through the list, hoping maybe there were a bunch of repeats, or these were short stories or something. No dice. I'd read about 10% of the titles in that list, and I recognized many of them from seeing her walking about with them.
She waved her hand at the list. "Oh, that's different," she demured. "It's not like I remember most of those. They're just, you know, a quick distraction."
At random, I named three titles. She gave me point-by-point plot summaries, character names, and then launched into a discussion of their relative stylistic merits and possible metaphoric relationships both to their genre politics and didactic elements.
Holy crap.
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