Let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that you or I read, on average, 50 books a year. This is based on reading approximately one book per week, with a two-week vacation (to make the math easier). I know many people read a lot more than this, but most people read less, and I think it is a reasonable number. At least, it is fairly true of me.

Now, also for the sake of argument, let’s estimate that we will all live to be 95 years old, and we will retain our eyesight and mental faculties until our last days. Omitting the first 5 years of life, when we did not know how to read, that gives us approximately 90 years of reading time in a lifetime.

So, averaging 50 books a year for 90 years means that most of us will read around 4,500 books over the course of our life.

In 2006 (the latest year for which I could find data), 291,920 books were published in the United States alone. It would take almost 65 of us, reading our entire lives, just to read all of those books. And that’s what was published in just one year.

I don’t know about you, but if I am going to be able to read only the tiniest fraction of all the books that are out there, I want them to be good books. Which means I’m not going to feel guilty again about putting a book down after page 100, or page 10, or paragraph 10, or even word 10.

Life’s too short to read bad books.

Related articles

• How to Become a Better Reader (readmorebooks.wordpress.com)
• “Great” Books Not Worth Reading… (readmorebooks.wordpress.com)

Being a better reader, I would say, means that you choose higher quality books that can enlighten as well as entertain you. By high quality, I don’t just mean the established canon of literature, but instead I am referring to well-written, impactful books in whatever genre speaks to your interests. Over time, you’ll find that you more naturally choose these books, that you learn more from your reading and that you retain what you’ve read longer. Your reading will start to inform other aspects of your life, particularly your creative life. In all respects, your reading will be richer.

A good way to become a better reader is to practice close reading. Instead of skimming or reading quickly, try reading word by word. Pay attention to the word choices writers have made and the way they have structured their sentences and paragraphs. Think about the effect they are trying to accomplish with their choices. You will read more slowly and you may read less, but you will get more out of what you read. And you will be unable to tolerate poor writing! For more on this technique, see Francine Prose’s book Reading Like a Writer or her article on Close Reading in The Atlantic.

I believe I became a better reader after I started journaling my reading. There are many methods available: a notebook, a blog, social sites like LibraryThing or GoodReads. Discussing what you’ve read with others is also helpful. Over time, I found myself choosing better books and thinking more deeply about what I read. It helps me to think of reading as a conversation between me (the reader) and the writer. Once the writer has his/her say, then I respond. This definitely helps me internalize what I’ve read and remember it longer.

It seems that these e-book spam operators are repurchasing cheap content, or are stealing the content outright, and posting them on the Kindle store as 99-cent e-books. Even worse, the same content may be repackaged into several different e-books with slightly different titles or publisher names. Often, this content is the product of content farms like eHow.com, and therefore not even worth almost a buck to buy, but the low price may lead to impulse purchases.

All this spam should make it hard for readers to find legitimate books worthy of spending their money on, which makes self-publishing e-books a dicey proposition. It will probably disillusion many readers, like me, from even considering purchasing e-books. And of course, writers are getting ripped off again, as they find plagiarized versions of their content bobbing in the spam soup.

I have to wonder why people are so quick to fill everything up with garbage. Amazon doesn’t seem willing to clean up its own store. Until it does, though, I won’t be investing in a Kindle.

Cover via Amazon

Here is an answer I gave to a question asked on Quora:
Which fiction books have people read more than once? Why?

1) For deeper understanding of the meaning of the book. Some books, especially those with challenging structures, benefit from rereading because each time you can dig deeper into the themes and unwind the complexities. Exs: Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell.

2) For comfort. Some books are so familiar and the characters are so beloved that I reread them if I just require some psychological comfort. For instance, after 9/11, I turned to Stephen King’s The Stand (strange choice, I know, but I love the people in that book so much). Other exs: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint Exupery, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.

3) To reacquaint myself with a book I’ve read long ago that I remember as being great but I don’t remember the details. I will pick it up again to see if it holds up, especially if I don’t remember much of the plot or if I read it under extreme circumstances (i.e., in college). Exs: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Secret History by Donna Tartt.

What are your favorite rereads? Why do you keep returning to particular books?

But that only makes me human, doesn’t it? Because we humans love our lists. We love to name things (even going back to the Bible!), then put them into categories, and then make lists of them. Tag, cross-reference, organize. This is pretty much what we do, we humans.

Umberto Eco has said, “We like lists because we don’t want to die.” I get that. Lists bring order to the chaos. They constrain the infinite. They name the unknowable. We live in a vast universe, and we will never be able to enumerate everything. But doesn’t it give some purpose to our lives to at least try? And so we make lists.

Lists also set boundaries. When there is so much out there — so much to read, hear, see, do, eat — lists give us a place to start and, perhaps more importantly, a place to stop. They let us know when we are finished. There is such a satisfaction when the last item is crossed off. Even if we turn around and start another list.

By the way, don’t search for the word “lists” on Google, if you want to know about lists. The Internet is full to the brim with lists. It’s like we invented it just so we have a place to make and share our lists. Here are a few useful list-making sites: Ta-da list; Listography; Lists of Bests.

Here are some lists of lists: 1001 before you die; Wikipedia’s lists; Flashlight Worthy book recommendations; McSweeney’s lists; Lit Lists; Listverse; my lists.

It seems obligatory to finish this post with a list of my own, so here is a list of 10 great list makers:

1. Benjamin Franklin
2. Thomas Jefferson
3. Peter Mark Roget
4. Oskar Schindler
5. David Letterman
6. Santa
7. Roger Ebert (Great Movies)
8. David Wallechinsky (Book of Lists)
9. the guys in High Fidelity
10. Umberto Eco