“Throw out stuff so you can buy more” – Maria Kondo
Miss me with that braindead shit.
She doesn’t even follow her own system anymore because she had kids and her system doesn’t work well for families she admits.
You can pry the books I never read out my cold dead hands!
(Feel free to suggest me some public domain books I can get from Gutenberg, maybe I will read them)
Laughs in research library
That means I would have to go to the library to borrow books I want to read and then really read them and turn them back in. I just want to buy books to sit on the shelf as I tell myself I will read them someday in the future.
Or… what if you do both…
I would hit the 30 limit so quick lol. Well I am past it
I can fit all of them in my pocket with ebooks and a bit of… um… you know… 🏴☠️ (yaRrr)
And how many are read?
I keep all my ebooks neatly categorized in Calibre. I also keep track on Storygraph. I still register what I read once in a while, but don’t bother with any of the reading streak pressure because it causes me anxiety. I love checking once a year and see that, despite the fact that my currently reading list never goes down. My read list is always growing (as well as my to-read list). So I decided to stop worrying and just enjoy whatever it is I’m reading at the moment without pressure.
Oh… um…
😅
(I collect them like people collect Steam Games 😉)
I feel attacked.
(Goes back to only playing CK2 and CRPGs)
Less than 30? That woman is goofy.
I find this attitude chilling.
Two copies of “Heading home with your newborn”?
They must have had twins.
My apartment is 60% books. I don’t have enough bookshelves, I have most loaded to the point where they are bending and there are piles of books stacked on top. Stacks and stacks and stacks.
I think my library is almost an art project at this point. I thrift a lot, check out library discard sales and have a bunch of things I bought when you could get books on Amazon for a penny + shipping. I often pick up 5-10 a week, because at the thrift shop that’s maybe $10 at most. (Goodwill is getting precious, but the really ratty ones are often prime spots.)
Very little fiction. Mostly textbooks and history and language and arcane computer things and strange religious literature and philosophy and paranormal arcana. Obscure things - I mostly collect things that I wouldn’t normally be able to find in a library.
My ex hated my books and wanted to work out a deal where I’d have to give up two for every one I took in. Now I am free to live in a pile of stacks. I don’t care if it looks “messy” or “cluttered.” It represents my mind.
A buddy called me to fix some plumbing in a house he baught , he said the previous owners were hoarders. So I went over and the whole fucking basement was wall to wall book shelves with fucking isles!
He said the lady that owned the house was some eccentric type that hung out in NY back in the 50’s around artists and writers, traveling the world etc. her husband was some sort of critic and they liked books.
I asked what he was doing with it all and he said he sold the contents of the house sight unseen to some guy that wanted it all and was going to be arriving any minute but if I wanted anything to take it now. My brain was scrambling, I didn’t want to be a dick so I just grabbed two books; Tropic of Cancer and Future Shock ( and a bunch of lab equipment that was in a secretive back room lol). They were both first edition books and had newspaper clippings about Miller and Toffler among other reviews that were stuffed in the pages.
It was crazy because they had so much bad ass shit , old leather bound stuff etc. It was just too much to process and I hope it didn’t all wind up in a dumpster. I wish I could have spent a few days pillaging those shelves.
At least when you die and archeologist find your trove we’ll be able to deep learn your stack in order to recreate a cyber you.
A goal of mine is to ensure that my library is preserved in some fashion after I die, because I do believe it would be valuable. Many of the books I have are out of print, rare, and obscure. I have a fantasy of a library room set aside with my collection - a couple of comfortable chairs in a little nook.
Especially with the way that AI has polluted information sources online, I think having a collection of the printed word which is guaranteed to be vetted and written by humans would be useful. The religious material I think also could be helpful in preserving history - eg, I have versions of Mormon books which are likely not consistent with current doctrine.
Bang ! BOOM! CRASH!!
Dog jumps out of bed and runs into the other room
Me: sorry doggo I was trying to get a drink of water, get back in bed
Doggo: why you do all that noises you fool
I don’t know who that is, but that might actually check out. I have a bookshelf full of books that i looved as a teenager :D i just keep them for the memories of enjoying them:P
If you should keep one thing in life it’s books.
If your whole schtick is about decluttering, you should be able to differentiate between “less” and “fewer.” Getting things down to a countable number achieves “fewer”-ness.
Also, looking at walls of books sparks joy.
Sorry, less word more good
Less word more fewer!
-
Less book more feuer!
Careful there, you sound a bit like a nazi.
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If your whole schtick is about decluttering, you should be able to differentiate between “less” and “fewer.” Getting things down to a countable number achieves “fewer”-ness.
Bullshit dogmatic rule by pedants who make up rules & pass them down like schmucks instead of observing & studying the actual, standard language. True: fewer is only for countables. However, less is fine. It has been used with countables for about as long as written English has existed as documented by linguists & English usage references:
quoted passage
The primary point is that the now-standard pedantry about less/fewer is in fact one of the many false “rules” that have recently precipitated out of the over-saturated solution of linguistic ignorance where most usage advice is brewed.
But not the usage advice at MWCDEU. This is the start of its entry on less/fewer:
Here is the rule as it is usually encountered: fewer refers to number among things that are counted, and less refers to quantity or amount among things that are measured. This rule is simple enough and easy enough to follow. It has only one fault—it is not accurate for all usage. If we were to write the rule from the observation of actual usage, it would be the same for fewer: fewer does refer to number among things that are counted. However, it would be different for less: less refers to quantity or amount among things that are measured and to number among things that are counted. Our amended rule describes the actual usage of the past thousand years or so.
As far as we have been able to discover, the received rule originated in 1770 as a comment on less:
This Word is most commonly used in speaking of a Number; where I should think Fewer would do better. No Fewer than a Hundred appears to me not only more elegant than No less than a Hundred, but strictly proper. —Baker 1770
Baker’s remarks about fewer express clearly and modestly—“I should think,” “appears to me”—his own taste and preference. […]
How Baker’s opinion came to be an inviolable rule, we do not know. But we do know that many people believe it is such. Simon 1980, for instance, calls the “less than 50,000 words” he found in a book about Joseph Conrad a “whopping” error.
The OED shows that less has been used of countables since the time of King Alfred the Great—he used it that way in one of his own translations from Latin—more than a thousand years ago (in about 888). So essentially less has been used of countables in English for just about as long as there has been a written English language. After about 900 years Robert Baker opined that fewer might be more elegant and proper. Almost every usage writer since Baker has followed Baker’s lead, and generations of English teachers have swelled the chorus. The result seems to be a fairly large number of people who now believe less used of countables to be wrong, though its standardness is easily demonstrated.
Less is more general than fewer, and the references identify common constructions where less is preferred with countables.
+1
Less junk, fewer things. Less anxiety, fewer panic attacks.
… And I already reached semantic satiation with “fewer.”
Less shit, fewer sewers.
How do I actually read more? Like how do force myself to read a book. I have some cool books I’d like to read but it’s hard to choose it over say a video game. I also have ADHD.
I got a kindle for Christmas and have read more in the last few months than in the last decade. I think it being a screen kinda helps, and also being able to download books instantly instead of having to go to the library or a bookstore.
Best way is to time box it, especially if you’re not accustomed to reading for long periods of time. You could start by carving out just 30 minutes of focused reading before you let yourself get into gaming sessions, which will give you a sense of when you start to feel fatigued (you may end up wanting to read longer). For me, making it a mission helps me focus better at least
When we moved in, the neighbors daughter was curious about the “new ones”, and asked if she could help.
I told her that I would be putting the books on the shelves the next day, and she promised to come over.
I don’t know what she expected (when we visited them, I never saw a book in their place), but she was shocked when she saw a large pile of boxes. I had just finished installing the first wall of shelves, and told her that we would have to sort the boxes out, only about 10k books were for the living room, the other would go up into the studio…
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.”
No one need 10.000 books
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.
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).
I indeed have a faster reading speed. I intentionally switched to English for reading (not my native language) to slow down the reading speed.
But I rarely read novellas or plays - I prefer proper books. When I was a kid, of course I read childrens books which were absolute quickies. But I did not include them in my count.
I can easily read The Lord of the Rings between lunch and dinner, and still enjoy Tolkiens play with languages, or tell you where to find a specific scene.
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.
Still off. I’m faster, and I’m older.
That means you’re the top 1% of the world, essentially, or even higher. Unlikely but not impossible, some of the fastest in the world read between 2,000-4,000 wpm.
I wasn’t guessing your age though, it was merely part of the calculation. If you’re older it just means you had even more time to read impressive numbers of books.
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.
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
