A little light reading...

I posted this in response to a friend's admission that she doesn't have the patience to read fiction novels.

-----------------

To illustrate the gulf of difference between your experience and mine, let's do a quick, messy calculation.

In my Delicious Library catalog, I have 126 fiction books. There are actually quite a few books I've read that aren't in this catalog, so let's estimate conservatively 170. The average number of pages of those books is probably roughly around 500 pages, give or take. In addition, there are several of these books, let's say 20, that I've re-read an average of maybe 5 times each.

150 read once = 150
20 read five times = 100
Total: 250 fiction book readings
250 x 500 pages = 125,000 pages
I just timed my reading of one page at roughly 1.5 minutes, although this speed has changed throughout my life. (I used to be faster! Now I pay more attention to detail)

So 125,000 pages times 1.5 minutes per page = 187,500 minutes total reading time. This translates into:

3125 hours
130 days
4.3 months

...of my life that I've spent reading fiction.

*AND* these estimates are quite conservative, *and* I am far from done!