this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2025
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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.
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.
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.
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.
They were just examples. My point is that novellas can be just as good as full length books!