There’s apparently a lot of anxiety about reading floating around. What “counts” as reading (audiobooks?) or whatever. Why would anybody care? I mean, I read because I want to read; because it’s fun.
So today’s Twitter mini-drama is that this guy upset all a few of Twitter’s book-reading denizens.
Let’s do some maths… (* 45 365) => 16425 minutes per year. I guess a normal reading speed on average would be 1.5 minutes per book page (a Murderbot page takes less time; a Gertrude Stein book takes more time), so (/ 16425 1.5) => 10950 pages. I think an average book is about 200 pages (Schattenfroh is more, an Annie Ernaux book is less), so (/ 10950 200) => 54 books per year.
So the poster is overshooting a bit, but it you adjust the reading speed a bit up and the page count a bit down, you’re totally within that range (but 100 books would need to be very small books indeed).
(Is my math right? I mean, I did go to university, but didn’t do great in calculus, and this is definitely calculus, right?)
So you get defensive responses like:
He didn’t say anything about all the books having the same length, did he? But this kind of bad-faith summation then leads to responses like this:
He didn’t say anything about “go through”, so relax…
I think he’s basically just saying “people that moan about not being able to find time to read one book are just lying”. With 45 minutes per day, you can read dozens of books per year, even if you’re just reading Schattenfroh, 2666 and Your Name Here. If you don’t, it’s because you don’t want to, which is fine.
(People who live in horrible poverty or war or abusive relationships etc excepted, of course.)
I’m just mentioning it because I’m currently reading a huge book that’s going to take me weeks, so I’m just relaxing between hours of that by reading shorter books.
I think I bought this at a Moor Mother concert? Because it is indeed she.
She’s pretty fantastic.
I quite liked this book, and especially the poem above. Some of the texts are quite like what she does in Irreversible Entanglements, of course, but many strike out into other territories. It’s good.
Fetish Bones (2016) by Camae Ayewa (buy used, 4.46 on Goodreads)
