1000, 100, & 10

 So, here's a thought experiment.

Suppose you found out you could read another thousand books in your time remaining. What would you read? Would you do anything different in choosing which books to read, once you started to treat books as a non-renewable resource, at least so far as your individual reading goes? Would you do more re-reading of favorites? Or shift more towards works you've never read before?

If a thousand is too large a number, what about a hundred?  This is much more do-able: checking my reading list I find I've read fifty books in the last year. So it's entirely feasible that even someone who reads at about half the rate I do may hit the hundred book mark in four or five years.

Let's get really dire: what if it were ten? We're talking literary hospice here (or desert island disk if you prefer). Would you carefully choose a few favorites, a few you've always intended to get to, and one or two just at random?

For the record, The most recent book I've read is AT SWIM-TWO-BIRDS by Flann O'Brien (1939) --my second reading of a book I liked much more the first time around, back in my Marquette days.  It's #II.3688 on the list. So I thought I'd look back and see where I was 1000 books ago.  II.2688 turns out to have been THE REMORSEFUL DAY by Colin Dexter, the thirteenth and last of the Inspector Morse books. I was in Oxford at the time (November 2007), on the fourth of my four solo research trips there, and it seemed appropriate while there to read a book set there.

Pressing on, a hundred books back brings us to July 2020 and #II.3588: THE PRIVATE LIFE OF THE RABBIT by R. M. Lockley.

So, it's taken me fifteen years to read a thousand books.

--John R. 

P.S. Of course some folks don't read all that much, so it's not much of a deal for them. I remember Mick Fleetwood once saying that he'd only ever read two books and liked them both, so he quit while he ahead.But for some of us reading is among the most enjoyable of our hobbies as well as at the core of our work.