this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2025
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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.
There are too many alarming assumptions in your scenario.
Given their claim I would assume @Treczoks@lemmy.world will have a much faster reading speed.
Their collection quite likely contains shorter genres (novellas, plays, poetry) and might also contain fast reads (trashy fiction, collections they were published in themselves and skim read the rest to be polite, etc).
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...
The fastest 5% of readers can hit around 700-1000 words per minute, and if you're autistic with hyperlexia, you can process text at extremely fast speeds using both brain hemispheres simultaneously. The average novel is about 90,000 words, so at 1000 wpm that's 90 minutes per book, meaning 5 books would take you 7.5 hours of reading daily. More realistically at 700 wpm, you're looking at 10.7 hours per day.
If you can sustain 5 books per day, that's 1,825 books per year. To reach 20,000 books, you'd need about 11 years of consistent daily reading. The math becomes even more favorable when you consider shorter works like romance novels (89,000 words), young adult books (50,000-80,000 words), and short story collections (30,000 words).
If you started this pace in your teens and you're now middle-aged, that's 2-3 decades of reading time. At 1,825 books per year, you could hit 36,500-54,750 books over 20-30 years. So your claim of tens of thousands of books isn't mathematically impossible, especially with the neurological advantages that come with hyperlexia. The math works if you're an absolute machine with enhanced reading processing abilities and the dedication to treat reading like a full-time job for decades.
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
I am by no means a speed reader, but even I think 238 words a minute is painfully slow!
It is pretty slow, I do about 450 a minute, though I do love reading.