A Life in Books

I began reading grown-up books when I was twelve or thirteen and by grown-up I mean Agatha Christie, Erle Stanley Gardner and Edgar Wallace. I have been reading ever since. I do discard books but, once I have started, then I try to get to the end. Sometimes that’s hard and eventually unrewarding. I’m not a speed reader of any kind. I don’t skim and I do read footnotes. So if I had to guess how many books I have read, on average, every year then the figure won’t be very high. Not less than 100 and not more than 200, I guess – I’ve never kept lists so I can’t be sure.

Suppose we settle on 150 a year – three a week – then in fifty years that’s a mere 7 500 books, many of them of ephemeral interest, many of them textbooks, many of them not worth the effort expended. Since I am now seventy I should be calculating on fifty seven or fifty eight years. OK. The round figure still only goes to 8 000. If I am under-estimating wildly, then 10 000.

They are very small numbers, aren’t they? And the number of books I have read more than once must be very small indeed, dominated by set texts read many times for teaching purposes. Things like J S Mill’s On Liberty.

It means that there are thousands of Should Read books that I have not read and maybe now I should try to make a List, prioritise as they say. After all, even if I read 150 books a year for another ten years, that’s only another 1 500. And there are books I would like to re-read, and some because I need to re-read them because I refer to them in something I am writing ( I just re-read John le Carré’s A Perfect Spy for that reason and that’s 680 pages in my edition).

Prioritise. But do I prioritise the unread short books or the unread long ones? And does a re-reading count as much as a new reading?