Valuable reading time

I love this bit from Family Guy. This isn’t the first time I’ve posted this pic. Last time I used it in a post musing why I hadn’t read more Dean Koontz novels.

Koontz acted as my archetypal author whom I haven’t read. We all have more books to read than we’ll ever have time to. So there will be some authors who we’ll gloss over or miss. I also made a point about not wasting time on bad books and mediocre authors. Being a nerd I used some math:

• Let’s use two averages 50 books per year and 100 books per year.
• Assume average reading lifespan is between age 10 and 80 = 70 years.
• Assume you only read any one novel once.
• Assume that you aren’t tragically hit by a car and can’t read.
• Thus, in a reading lifetime you can read between 3,500 and 7,000 books.
• There were over 300,000 books published in the USA last year. Over 8,000 in my home country of Australia.

If we do waste time on bad books then the list of authors we’ll gloss over will be longer. We may miss out on something we really love just so we can trudge through something we don’t.

But the best part of posting the pic last time was an author friend sending the post to Dean Koontz. And I still haven’t read Odd Thomas…