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Books (lemmy.ml)
submitted 17 hours ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[-] [email protected] 19 points 12 hours ago

When we moved in, the neighbors daughter was curious about the "new ones", and asked if she could help.

I told her that I would be putting the books on the shelves the next day, and she promised to come over.

I don't know what she expected (when we visited them, I never saw a book in their place), but she was shocked when she saw a large pile of boxes. I had just finished installing the first wall of shelves, and told her that we would have to sort the boxes out, only about 10k books were for the living room, the other would go up into the studio...

[-] [email protected] 6 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago)

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.

[-] [email protected] 8 points 9 hours ago

No one need 10.000 books

Not with that attitude.

[-] [email protected] 0 points 5 hours ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 6 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

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.

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this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2025
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