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.
That reminds me of the section in Black Swan where Taleb talks about Umberto Eco's library:
"The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?” and the others — a very small minority — who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary."
Not with that attitude.
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.
"As a teenager."
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.
Lucky me has been a speed reader basically from the start. I cannot imagine how painfully slow 238 words per minute must feel. The brain has probably forgotten half of the story when the reader reaches the end of a book weeks later. As a teenager, I already read about five books a day. Autism has its advantages...
Theodore Roosevelt could read several hundred page books every night in a few hours and have all the information on total recall ....from what I've read. Apparently he would impress world leaders by studying their entire culture before meeting and it allowed him to deeply connect with them. My grandfather was the same way.
I wish I was that lucky but my brain doesn't work like that