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How many books have you read?

Angus McPresley

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In another thread, Vagabond writes:

I have read thousands of books. I have over 1000 just on my bookshelves.
Click to expand...

So my question to you all is, how many have YOU read? Try to come up with an estimate.

I've always loved the scene in Cosmos where Carl Sagan is standing in the Library of Congress talking about knowledge, and says something like, "If you read a book a day, the number of books you'd read in a lifetime would run from about here [indicating a bookshelf] ...to... [walk down a few racks] here." Then they show the whole a montage of the whole library. It's not the only moment in that miniseries that made me feel... tiny. I choose the books I read a little more carefully these days.

I'd say I've read 500-600.
 
I am not anal enough to have actually counted all my books. I am fairly sure I have that many but it's a guesstimate. When I was young I would check out the max number of books they would let me from the library and read them all. But, not sure if you should count the 50 page books for kids as "books"? Although I did keep up this level of reading up through high school.

In the Navy I would buy 40-50 books everytime I went out to sea and read them all. We were very short of space and everytime you moved you were carrying everything you owned on your back so while I read them I couldn't keep them back then. Since I got out of the Navy in 84 I have kept pretty much every book I have read. I read a few from the library and I have loaned out a few I never got back. I still read a good amount but nothing like I did when I was younger. There is so much more to do now. Do books on tape count? ;) How about things like Shakespeare's plays? I have all his plays in one huge mother book, is that one book or one for each play? ;) How about books you have only partially read, like reference books or books of quotes? I have a literature anthology that is 2700 pages.
 
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Angus McPresley said:
So my question to you all is, how many have YOU read? Try to come up with an estimate.
Click to expand...

No idea.

Well, let's start with some conservative assumptions to achieve the least possible lower bound:

A book a week for 20 years => 20 x 52 = 1040.

So at least 1000. Though, for most of my life I've been reading more than one book a week (as a preteen I might read 6-10 books a week) but I haven't got a good reason to assign any particular average there.

Another way to look at it is the size of my bookshelf. I'm not going to count the books, but instead take a random sampling. The first shelf that I counted had 28 books, the second 25. By non-random sampling I next counted also the shelf that has most books, and the number was 85 books discounting booklets (it was the shelf where I store the old military manuals, they are small in size so I can fit two rows of them on one shelf), and the shelf with least books had 18 books (all thick novels).

I now arbitrarily choose the 25 to be the average number. There are 31 shelves full of books. On random piles lying around there are about two shelf-fulls more, and my workplace has at least one shelf more of my own books. So, this gives 34 * 25 = 850 as the lower bound on the number of books that I own, though, there's about a dozen or so among them that I haven't read for various reasons, mainly because they are in language that I don't understand.

A quite conservative estimate would be that I've read at least two books for every book that I own which would raise the lower bound to 850 * 3 = 2550.

And this is the final extent that I bother to continue the computation.
 
The only one I need to: The Holy Bible. I'm just kidding. I couldn't read it all.
 
I don´t know how many books I´ve read. At least a thousand, I guess. Most of those were SF and Fantasy and similar light reading. Quite a few non-fiction books, up to and including "A Short History of Time" (and I think I actually understood most of it,too). Relatively few classics... well, "Ben Hur", "Gone with the Wind", "The Godfather"... that´s about as classic as I´ll go for fiction.

For me... when I read fiction, I want to be entertained. For content and depth, I read non-fiction. That doesn´t mean I don´t like entertaining non-fiction (I LOVED Bad Astronomy), for example, but the entertainment is just a bonus.
 
I'm guessing that I've averaged about two books/week since I was 10 (34 yrs ago), so that comes out to 3536 books.

Hmm. You'd think I'd be smarter...

Meg
 
Angus McPresley said:
So my question to you all is, how many have YOU read? Try to come up with an estimate.
Click to expand...

I looked at the books on my shelf

and found out

-I have 58 books on the shelf

-minimum # of pages out of the books: 72

-maximum # of pages out of the books: 1616

-median # of pages of the books: 341

-mean # of pages of the books: 448 (the books pulling this number of so far above the median are the Bible with 1616 pages and The Annotated Sherlock Holmes with 1512 pages)

-date of newest book: 2006

-date of oldest book: 1920 (bird identification book)

-main topics of books: statistics, math, taiji, Mandarin Chinese language


I give so many away after I read them several times and I have no desire to keep the book, so it is hard to estimate how many I've read throughout my whole life though.
 
I'd say, following similar calculations to those of other people, that I've read between 1000 and 2000 books--and closer estimate is hard to make.

But of those books, only about 50, if not less, really "stayed with me". Some of them did so because they're great books, others, because of personal reasons. My conclusion, thinking of the books that were important to me, is that when everybody tells you that this or that fat old book is a wonderful classic that you just have to read, they are usually correct.

Not always--I think Moby Dick is an enormous bore, for example--and certainly I'm not saying those are the only books worth reading. I'm merely saying that of the 50 or so books that had a strong effect on me, surely 80% or so are just such classics.
 
It would have to be in the range of thousands. I have been reading at a steady pace since learning to do so at age 6-7, long around 1952. I would make weekly visits to the bookmobile that came to my neighborhood, and walk home with an armload, then repeat the next week.
That's in addition to a steady diet of periodicals and newspapers.
 
T'ai Chi said:
-date of oldest book: 1920 (bird identification book)
Click to expand...

The oldest that I have is from 1858 but it is a bit debatable whether it counts as a book or just a booklet. It is an edict by His Imperial Majesty Alexander II, By God's Grace The Emperor and Sovereign of All Russia, The Grand Prince of Finland, etc, etc, etc. [Yes, all three 'etc's are a part of the short version of his title. The long version is, well, long].

The edict establishes that a military force should be raised in Finland and describes its organization.
 
It appears I am on the low end of the range here. I read a couple of books a month. Probably 20-25 a year. And, unfortunately, I didn't really read stuff that wasn't assigned to me until college (though I read plenty of comic books and sports magazines).
 
When I was a sophmore in high school, our English teacher had us write down every book we read. I set a new record of over 100. It stood for 2 years until my future husband broke it when he was in the same teachers class.

I have no idea how many I've read over the years, but it must be in the 1000's. However, it really slowed down when I became a parent. Perhaps in a few years I can pick up again when my youngest is bet less dependent and I'm out of school for good.
 
Are we counting books that we've re-read?
 
Wow - interesting question. I love books and am surrounded by them. I also read them.

I'm 49, lifelong student, never married, no kids.

I'm guessing 8,000 to 9,000 - I read a lot and fairly quickly. Some are repeats, but most are not. I've got about 20 piled next to my bed - I'm partway through about 5 of them - read whatever suits my mood.

I love fiction, sci-fi and fantasy, history (esp. Greek and Roman), selected biographies, math, science, philosophy, history of science and math, mysteries, Le Carre, Shakespeare, Gibbon, Moby Dick, essays, poetry, etc.
 
Since 1-1-02 I've kept track of every book I've read. From 2002 to 2005 I've averaged 51 books a year. So far, for 2006, I've finished 9 books.
My secret? No cable TV!
 
I really should have kept a list of everything I've read.

In the room where I'm sitting to type this there are approximately 1,500 books and I've read all of those except for 30 or so of Mrs Malbui's books which are in Russian, which I don't speak. To that number I should add my university reading which was prolific (the joys of a degree in linguistics - you can spend all day in the library without worrying about stuff like lectures), the contents of my parents' bookshelves (I got through maybe half of their 2,000 books), and everything I read growing up - six books a week from the town library for maybe ten years. Hmmm - we must be talking about a serious amount of reading matter here.
 
No real idea. Definitely in the thousands, going back to my first library card in Wadsworth, Ohio.

Right now I have about 3 books open and read to various levels (The Faith Healers, Lincoln at Cooper Union, and Nothing but Victory: The Army of the Tennessee) and just finished two and have about 10-12 on the small sofa waiting my persusal. Library--maybe about 1200.

What makes it difficult is what you count as a book. I get Smithsonian Magazine each month, about 100 pages of mostly worthwhile reading, and haven't failed to complete an issue in years. I have almost 20 years of well-read Analog magazines, a Science Fiction journal that contains the words of a short novel every month...do they count?

Some books I never seem to finish (I've been pecking at the Lincoln book for several months) and others I finish in one sitting (Longitude, for example, got me from St. Louis to Huntsville via Atlanta after Christmas).
 
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