I like to read a lot, but I’m pretty haphazard about how I do it. I’ll read whatever book I’m reading whenever I have a chance, and for just as long as I have time. That might mean I read for an hour, or only ten minutes. For books that I really get into, like some novels (which also read fairly fast), I may make more time and just keep plowing through to see what happens.
I was reading a book this morning that clocks in at just under 600 pages, and it suddenly occurred to me that if I read it in fifty-page chunks, I’d be done the book in only 12 days.
I’m not sure how typical I am, but I read fairly quickly. I don’t think it’s “speed reading” caliber of quick, but I gather I read a little faster than average. Regardless, if I set aside a little time, I could read fifty pages of most prose in under an hour (if the book in question is a calculus textbook, it would take substantially longer; it depends how much processing you need to do of the material before moving on). So fifty pages actually seems pretty doable.
No matter how fast you read, you can probably arrive at a reasonable assessment of how many pages you can read in, say, a half hour or an hour. From that, you can figure out the size of book you could complete within a week or two if you just set aside that time each day to read. If you actually sit down and consider it, you could potentially read a lot of books in a year, probably substantially more than you ever thought you could. Depending on your tastes, if a portion of those are non-fiction, you can learn a lot of stuff in a year.
(Yes, I know, simply reading a book on a subject doesn’t necessarily mean you have “learned” it. Still, you are likely to learn something. Seems worth thinking about, to me.)
Read any good books lately, though?
Finished Anathem by Neal Stephenson, which was great.
I'm also currently reading through The Rails Way by Obie Fernandez, et al., Barron's Finance, and Hull's Options, Futures, and Other Derivatives. Er. Yeah. So, clearly, some sort of plan is needed.