errantember

I just wrote this to an independent bookseller on Amazon. The rest of the story tells itself!
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Writing this was unnecessary, but I think you'll find it amusing.

During my childhood, The Poky Little Puppy was my absolute favorite book. I recently found a copy at a local bookstore and bought it. Re-reading it, it rang a few bells, but I wasn't really emotionally connected to the experience. What I *really* needed was to hear my mother reading it *to* me. At first I was going to ship her my copy and ask her to record herself reading it, but then I though, shit, I can get it on Amazon for less than the cost of mailing it with no trip to the post office. So I ordered the copy for her from you. Then, a few days later, I got an order from Amazon. It was the Poky Little Puppy! My first assumption was that I had made an error in the address in my order to you. I went and checked, and, Lo and Behold, the address was correct! So I fired up this message to complain, but decided to double-check the receipt on the copy I just got.

And it was from my Mom. A completely unrelated order!

So you're doing great, helping people re-connect with their favorite childhood memories.

Carry on!

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

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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!