How much should we read?

I noticed some years ago that my leisure reading had been dropping off, so I set a target of 24 books (anything not directly related to my work – so fiction, poetry, non-fiction, thin books, thick books) per year – equalling roughly 2 titles per month. That sort of worked, without stressing me. If I look at last year’s list, some would perhaps count at work-realited (I mean – “Citizen Involvement in Employment Policy” IS your average bedtime reading, right.), some were read very quickly, Fintan O’Toole’s “We Don’t Know Ourselves” on the other hand took me ages – or at least months to finish. Circumstances was one reason, the depth of description and analysis of the Irish society another (I would definitively recommend the book to anyone interested in Ireland or social change). The same went for the Tokarcziuk.

I’m not really too keen on quantifying our daily lives, and for a number of reasons I deleted my Goodreads account last year (doesn’t work very well with Scandinavian litterature), but the trick with 24/year sort of worked for me – mainly because I missed reading for my own sake.

Obviously posting my 2022 list (inspired by Art Garfunkel’s site) may be a bit contradictory, but: https://jacobchristensen.eu/2023/01/02/bogaret-2022/

I’ve always regarded +/-50 books a year as about the right number (call it one per week). But I put big brackets around that. That run-rate equates to around 12-15 hours of dedicated personal reading time a week and is completely separate for any work related reading I may also undertake.

As you note in the OP, the sort of work you pursue and the length of each work matters. If one sets out to read a single tome in the Game of Thrones series that would comprise about 3 or 4 ordinary length literary fiction novels and accordingly would impact your book count but not your page count.

The proportion of fiction and non-fiction matters too. The year it came out I read the wonderful – Leonardo Da Vinci by Walter Isaacson. It not only weighed in around 600 pages, the density of the discussion, the detailed footnotes and the frequent tie-ins to what was happening historically in Europe, Italy, the church etc. made it an extremely rich read but not a quick one. I mentally counted that as about 4 books that year and found it read better being picked-up and put down to allow time for contemplation and assimilation.

That was a far more quality read than 4 Dan Brown novels (Da Vinci code, see what I did there) that I could probably have taken down in a week or two.

The OP sounds spot on to me. I consider myself a fairly avid reader and read around 60 books per year. That includes a fair amount of genre fiction, some graphic novels (these go quickly), as well as some heavier literature and philosophy. If I stuck to reading the heavier works, my numbers would be much lower.

“My guess is that most of these super-readers are not reading such works, or the Critique of Pure Reason, but but rather short thrillers and the like.” That fits my impression as well. There’s also “pop nonfiction,” which in many cases seem like stretched-out magazine articles, or, judging by the font and page dimensions of some of the books, perhaps are just magazine articles.

Having said that, I do occasionally come upon “super readers” who seem to also read more serious works. I’m not sure how they do it, but I get the impression that they don’t read the texts with the level of care you correctly recommend. They seem to come away from the books with an understanding you could get from reading a short encyclopedia summary of them.

My feeling is that reading, at least book reading, should be in decline, given the proliferation of other, often superior, ways of engaging with information. The book-a-week people are missing out on a lot of good stuff.

I used to knock off a book of genre fiction a day, probably reading too fast. Once I was halfway through a Ross MacDonald mystery and realized I’d read it before, but I still couldn’t remember how it ended. My dad could go through three mysteries in a day; it takes a lot of schlock to feed such a habit.

I mostly gave it up once I had a broadband Internet connection, except for a few months after the former guy was elected, when I decided to catch up on a new generation of SF authors. It felt worthwhile, but proved ultimately unsatisfying.

Just post-college I devoted a week to Ulysses, and definitely went too fast at times. After retiring, I spent about a week reading Don Juan, and that seemed about right.

Quick, random thoughts:

I’m an extremely slow – and easily distracted – book reader, so that I aim for about 20-25 books a year, roughly like Jacob Christensen. That number has remained fairly stable over the years. Smartphones, social media and other similar distractions have not so much decreased my book reading as made it harder to persevere through really dense books – or, put differently, made it easier to discard books I just can’t get into. If I’m not feeling it 100-150 or so pages in, I’ll just move on to something else. My lists range from Grisham to Gramsci and pretty much anything in between.
This said, very few things compare with the pleasure of going to a used bookstore, spending a couple of hours browsing through and coming out with two or three titles you had never heard of. Things like that also help maintain that special connection with print books. I have a hard time imagining I could ever transition to a Kindle, for instance, especially as I spend too much time in front of screens already.
Last year, I surprised myself by going through a 200-page thriller, cover to cover, in one evening, probably for the first time in decades: A look at the lives of the French version of Enid Blyton’s Five after they reach adulthood: Careers, failed marriages, alcoholism, delinquency, other calamities. Their lives unravel further after they gather for Christmas and strange things begin happening: People dying mysteriously, visions of what seem like the characters’ English alter egos in their dreams, voices in their heads. Just a fun, very original story with lots of dark comedy, as well as supernatural and, broadly speaking, time travel elements. Again, though, what I loved most, and found reassuring, was picking it up one afternoon and not letting it down.
An IR scholar I know aims for 100 books a year, but also makes a point of blocking everything else out (smartphones, laptops) during his four or five hours’ daily reading block. I feel he’s an exception, though. Maybe others are capable of such focus, but I rather lean toward Slanted Answer’s take.
Like many others here, much of my reading these days consists of non-academic 6,000-word thought pieces in outlets like The Atlantic, think tank reports, or 15-part Twitter threads pretty much any topic. Incidentally, Twitter has developed into an astonishingly good source of intelligent, well-argued conversation, considering the limits of the format as well as the challenges the platform is facing these days.
I wonder where others here come down on audiobooks. I started trying them out fairly recently – a couple of literary classics, The Prince, Commissario Brunetti – and have found them a very enjoyable experience.

If I remember correctly, in “Reading the Romance” the author talked to people who read two or three romance novels every day.

I have always been a serious reader. I have elitish prejudice, and do a mix of fiction & non fiction. Am alwys appalled at the prevalance of airport fiction in libraries and on Kobo site.
That said, with the coming of online news I scan the NYT WPost & Guardian daily. That cuts down on book time.
I am a retired early elementary school techer, and I agree with the post by Sandel. Abig part of teaching reading is free choice reading. Tho a noisy classroom isnt a very good place to think. Maybe just start later, sent them home earlier?

I read somewhere between 100-150/year. One or two a week when I’m working, and 1-2 a day when I’m not (eg over Christmas, going on family trips etc). Almost entirely crime fiction of one sort or another (plus a few cricket books/year and plus I don’t know how many books/year for work, but that’s work). I learned to read late, and read all of Enid Blyton fast once I did learn, less in my teens, then started reading relentlessly in college (I read The Brothers Karamazov in one sitting, which I’ll never do again, and the entire works of Raymond Chandler in three weeks. Just to be clear, I attended exactly 1 1/2 parties when I was in college (and left the 1 after about an hour because I was bored) so I had a lot of time to read).

How fast really depends. Angela Marsons, Kate Ellis, or James Craig I read really fast. James Oswald or Reginald Hill I savour. PD James, Kate Atkinson — I go slow. Probably the speed I read is related to the volume at which the author produces (Ellis and Marsons are prolific, Oswald is less so). When, rarely, I read literary fiction I read at a much slower pace.

bad Jim’s post makes me wonder whether these things go through families. My mum’s dad and my dad’s mum were prolific crime fiction readers, as is my mum, as am I, as is one of my children (she reads more academic stuff for work than I do because she works more, and so has less time for fiction, and is entirely dependent on me for recommendations: her policy is to read the best 20-30% of what I read and trusts me to pass on exactly the best 20-30%, which is a very efficient procedure, but god knows what she’ll do when I die).

I really enjoyed reading through this post and the comments and learning a bit more about how other people experience reading and books. A few comments from my experience:
– I do almost all of my book reading on my phone. I find the Apple Bookstore and the Kindle dangerously convenient. As soon as you finish a book in a series you can just immediately purchase the next one and start it right then. Plus I always have my phone with me.
– I read 26 books in 2022 (mostly from long running series that I am working my way through and all fiction except one) plus a whole bunch of free audiobooks on Youtube which I like to listen to in bed when falling asleep.
– History podcasts have basically replaced my non-fiction reading over the past 15 years or so. Series like Revolutions and the Age of Napoleon are, for me, a really great way to scratch that itch from my History undergrad.
– The big exception to this pattern is when I go on holiday to a beach location (which I haven’t done in a few years thanks to health issues and COVID). If you give me a sunny beach, a few drinks and a bit of peace I can churn through 1-2 genre fiction titles a day very happily.

Might get to 140 books a year or above but im unemployed and that involves lots of very short easy to read books. Not that higher status literature always requires reading slower. My reading speed does not really drop when reading in Italian or English either. For me that is just a question of taste. Neither wrong nor right.

To my mind, internet has fundamentally changed my reading, mostly for the better. Of course, I unscrupulously go to sites with free downloads of books – massive libraries – as well as the sources of a university library. The consequence is that reading a book is often reading a whole tribe of other things. For iustance, I was reading Rasula’s history of Dada, Destruction was my Beatrice, the other day. In the chapter on Kurt Schwitters, he mentions a story by Schwitters that he compares to Kafka’s In the Penal Colony – the Onion. I read German, so I checked out a book containing a collection of Schwitters articles and poems. Then, since that didn’t have the story, I went to Internet Archive. This divergence from the Rasula, in the pre-internet days, would surely have taken a day, Plus looking up other articles – in my search for the Schwitters, I ran into Hugo Ball’s correspondence and downloaded that, too, to check out the letters from the 1916 period. On the one hand, this divergence from Rasula’s book means that it takes me longer to read it. And I might be diverted for a longer time than is fair for Rasula. On the other hand, this kind of reading has become a sort of habit – I’ve become a hypertext reader. I don’t doubt that hundreds of thousands of readers now approach books this way. There is a loss of depth – especially when reading longer novels, I have felt this. That concentration is the sort of downhill weight that keeps me reading a text. But I’ve quite successfully read big books – Magic Mountain, Wolf Hall – in ebook format.

Regarding literature that would typically require emotional engagement with sad things, i usually do not read it, or might skip a lot of pages not getting emotionally engaged. The last “complicated” book i have been reading was man without qualities. It was enjoyable because the word choice was different from what i am used too, funny at times and i would say of some value understanding society at the time of writing. Had i known the number of suicide attempts and sociopath mass murders involved in the plot in advance, i would not have read it.

So somewhat happy with reading man without qualities, i went on to the Buddenbrooks. Which turned out to be written like my usual mass science fiction consumption in style, with a storyline boring and unrealistic as hell, full of dull stereotypes and obvious mental health issues not treated overtly as such all in a trama that it seems was supposed to be realistic. Ended up not finishing it 3/4 through and never felt slowing down on reading speed would be necessary or worth it.