Why would I want to keep count?

Wood - Sometimes it's fun to keep count and see how it varies from week to week, month to month, year to year...

But perhaps doing this means I'm a bit anal-retentive.

I love keeping a reading journal...

What, Siobhan - in the whole of my life......?

Sixty-one since January.

I'm a little behind my usual average of 15 books per month, but I've read/listened to 99 books this year.

I'm not keeping track.

However, when I was much younger I read a book nearly every day. Now I read a book or two most weeks, with an intense book binge a few times a year. Reading is still the activity at the core of my life, but it now competes with gardening, sewing, and spending time with family and friends. I was more single minded about it when I was in my teens.

Rosefolly

One more comment -- I have to confess that my first reaction was the same as Dido's. All my life long? I suppose I could estimate. Definitely in the thousands.

I've 'read' 152 books in 102 volumes so far this year. However, 4 of the volumes were mostly drawings, comprised of 3 collections of a total of 48 previously published short comic books and 13 previously unpublished pieces (incomplete comics and single drawings that I counted as one book) by Edward Gorey and 1 was a collection of 5 previously published books of one panel comics (1001 drawings all in all) and none of those had much text, so I could probably be said to have absorbed rather then read them.

The rest have mostly been rather short books, under 300 pages. My page count is definitely lower than it was at the same time last year, when I had read considerably fewer but longer books.

This morning?.........teehee

Perhaps how much one reads is as important as what one reads, although one would not want to press this point too much. Given the fact that we all have different tastes, perhaps the essential question or comment under "Favorite Books" is not "which books one has read" but "how much," "when" and "why." As the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer wrote: "Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents." I these tangential remarks for this part of the site: (a) to initiate a discussion on books for those inclined and (b) to indicate which are my favorite books.

It is impossible for me to make an accurate record or even a reasonable guesstimation of what might be called my reading record since 1960, some 50 years, from my mid-teens to these middle years of late adulthood, age 15 to 65. I have made a start at such a record, though. For the most part, my reading is in the social sciences and humanitiesÂa vast field to say the least and too extensive to even provide a cursory list of my favorite books here.

In the English-speaking world the great majority of books that have been published in the last century are like academic tombs which transfer dry bones from one graveyard to another: they show unmistakable talent and are professionally competent, the result of long processes of learning, application and work; accuracy is found; the words are in their right place and as they should be. But to the vast majority of the peoples of the world, indeed about 99.9% if not 99.999(repeater), it makes not the slightest difference whether they exist or not. This fact, though, does not make of this immense literary enterprize a meaningless activity. Indeed, these books, or at least some of them, are the very breath of life to millions.

Here is a link that might be useful: Pioneering Over Four Epochs

I counted up my book list last night, and reached 75. Seems rather a lot to me, and makes me wonder if I am neglecting other parts of life, but then I thought, "Naah" and smiled.

Keep in mind some of these are graphic novels/sequential art (if you're trying to be high-minded), and these can be read in half an hour sometimes. Oh, and I have been reading kid lit as well - Ramona still takes the lead in that...

lemonhead/liz, I think you should be getting a prize for the number of books you list each month. How do you manage to fit in so much reading with a job (full time?) plus husband the-feeding-laundry-cleaning-up-afterwards-off?
I would be doing really well if I managed a book a week and am lucky if I get an hour in the afternoon and a few minutes in bed before my eyes droop. There are just so many things 'to do' in the house and garden (not that I do ALL I should) plus the DH looks hurt and says "I suppose you are going to read a book again" in that sad, voice used when he has the mowing/weeding/planting to do.
I have to tell myself it is quality rather than quantity that counts. ;-)

Veer, what really counts more than either quality or quantity is the pleasure you take from the activity, along with the insight you gain that illuminates the rest of your life. And even light reading can provide that illumination, if it presents to you a way of looking at things that ad not occurred to you before. I have had many aha! moments from books of trivial literary value.

Lemonhead, Ramona is one of my favorite characters of all time. Boing!

Rosefolly

Rosefolly/Paula you are, of course, quite correct about the pleasure any book can bring.
I don't want to give the impression that only heavy, dusty worthy tomes are all that we should be aiming to read and I'm sure many people got enormous pleasure from say The DA Vinci Code despite its many historical inaccuracies and appalling use of 'English'.
The point (for what little it is worth) that I was trying to make is that some people feel that because they have read War and Peace in a weekend it somehow puts them on a higher literary plain than the rest of us.
As you say, at the end of the day, reading should be about enjoyment. I honestly cannot think of a book I have read that illuminated 'the rest of my life'. That might make an interesting thread for discussion.

A book is a delicious promise of pleasure whenever I find a moment of down time.
My life is quite full of many obligations, hobbies, joys, duties....but I find time every day to sit down and connect with my book-of-the-moment.
I really love knowing that a good book is waiting for me whenever I want it.

What do non-readers look forward to!?

Every year I say to myself, this is the year that I will read 100 books!!! I just counted up the pages in my book journal for this year and I'm at a whopping. . .27. Maybe I can step it up a bit and at least be able to say I read on average a book a week in 2010.

Getting great quality time in with the DH and the 3-year-old and the 7-month-old, though.

Yoyobon, I figure those "others" must just clean house all the time. Seriously, I know several people who watch TV endlessly. To me that is mind numbing, but everyone is different.

Luckily most of my family have all been readers, only one older lady saying with disapproval "Got your head stuck in a book again?". If we said "Last chapter" that was a let-off if there was someone wanting something done and the reader was given those extra moments to finish the book!
It must be hard for a reader to be in an unsympathetic environment. :-(

My mother used to say, "Find a stopping place" when it was time to do the supper dishes.

Does anyone recall the very first book that you checked out of a library ( not children's book.....a novel/chapter book) which you read?

BLUEBERRY SUMMER

My husband used to track how many pages (of books) he'd read...

I can top that, a quaint old lady who lived on an island in the Adirondacks would keep track of how many blueberries she picked each time she went out. She also had a season running total !
Whew.
You'd feel guilty eating the pie!

Vee - Thanks for the kudos. You're right, I do have a FT job and a DH who is, I am happy to say, much more domesticated that I am. He does the majority of the cooking/clean-up while I clean the house every day in small parts (mostly putting things away type of thing)...

Plus it's lucky that DH is quite understanding about my need to read (as I have always been a big reader since he has known me), so he just goes to the back of the house and either watches tv or plays his computer games. However, we do work on spending quality time together so it all rather works out in the wash. Every now and then, a book may cross his path, but not often. It's good to have different interests...

One thing that we DON"T have and a lot of people do is kids and I think that gives us a lot more freedom than otherwise...

yoyobon - I am not sure which was the first chapter book I took out of the library. However, the ones I remember the most were the Mrs. Piggle Wiggle books - and I think that one of those may have been the first.

Yoyo: That is too much to ask of me! What was my first proper book taken out of a library about 65 years ago? My poor brain won't take that much racking! I presume you don't mean Enid Blyton children's books? Those would have been a librarian's recommendation when I joined up about 6yo. My mother assured her that I was good with books. There was such a shortage in libraries in WW2 they were all precious items then. We had to be about 10yo to be allowed into the adult section unless to 'choose a book for Mummy'.

I haven't kept count but I know that I've read fewer books since I retired a year ago. I used to commute by bus 80 minutes a day and used to finish a paperback every other day, not only by reading on the bus, of course. Now I can read for longer stretches, concentrate better and read undisturbed. I find that I've begun to read the heavier books in my TBR pile, heavy in every sense now that I don't have to carry them with me all the time.

mariannese......oh my, 80 minute commute??!
That would really discourage me from wanting to get up in the morning. I admire your fortitude. I am not a good sitter and that would fry me for the rest of the day.
Brava.

Hello Mariannese -

I see by your background info that you live in a village with Viking history. I'm really intrigued with the Vikings, and would like to find a good book about them. I don't want a novel; just a history book -- but, an exciting one !

Can you recommend one? Oh, ... and it has to be in English (or a good translation into Eng.).

Thanks !

Nothing wrong with keeping count -- I enjoy keeping track of the books I've read, and have used Bibliophil and a back-up notebook (the site was down for months at one point but is now functioning again) for my lists since 2001. This year's total so far is only 28 -- quite a bit lower than usual. My TBR pile, however, has grown to intimidating proportions. Once the kids are back in school I'll have more time for reading (or so I hope, anyway).

I've kept track of what books I read since 2005. One reason I started keeping track is that I was forgetting whether or not I had already read a book. I'd get half-way through it and realize I had read it before! Also, on another on-line book group I belong to we have an end of year recap, where we share our ten favorite (and least favorite!) books of the year. It's hard to remember if you don't write it down; or at least it is for me.

I've read 45 books so far this year. That doesn't count the probably two dozen I've started and then not finished.

I started keeping track of books read in 2001 or so, inspired by this forum. Originally, it was just a list, then I began adding short comments, and now I positively look forward to finishing a book and putting my thoughts about it down in my log. I re-read a lot, but track only 'new' books in the log. This year, my count is currently 41, although it includes a few picture books along with the weightier tomes.

mariannese, I find that my train-ride commute increases my reading as well (although mine is only about 45 min one way). I will carry the hardcovers and larger volumes, and I notice that I'm more likely to read non-fluffy books, because my reading is earlier in the day when I'm not wiped out by a day at work.