Besides the two resolutions I made for 2022, I’ve decided to try out a meta-resolution: every year from here on out, I will resolve to read the same number of books as years I am old (inspired by the coincidence that I finished 42 books last year, which happened to match my age). I track all my reading on Goodreads, where you can follow along if you’d like.
Given the above challenge, I wanted to determine how much of a time investment was going to be involved, and especially wanted an easy way to break it into daily reading targets that would keep me on pace. To do so, I needed two pieces of data: an average book size in pages, and an average time spent per page. My gut feel for these values was 300 pages and 1 minute, which led to a nifty conclusion: if I let A be my age, and aim to read A pages per day, which takes roughly A minutes, I should be able to easily complete my goal of A books over the course of the year (365 > 300, but I expect I’ll miss days here and there). Plugging in my current age of 43, that means a modest investment of 43 minutes per day is all it takes to achieve what otherwise sounds like a difficult goal. Isn’t that neat?
Neat enough that I wanted to validate my assumptions. For average book size, I downloaded the last 10 years of my reading records from Goodreads (I’ve been doing this a while): 84218 pages divided by 288 books gives an average size of 292 pages. My guess was pretty dang close, cool!
To measure my reading speed, I timed how long it took me to read 10 pages of three representative books: Multipliers (business/engineering non-fiction), Lifting the Veil (religious non-fiction), and The End of Eternity (science fiction). Resultant times were 6.5, 10.5, and 10.5 minutes for 10 pages, respectively, which averages out to 0.9 minutes per page. Once again, my intuition was reasonable.
One final statistic worth pondering: if I can hold to this meta-resolution, how many more books can I expect to read before I shuffle off this mortal coil. Thanks to Google, I know average life expectancy for a male in the United States is 75, so we’ll say I’ve got 32 years left. Thanks to Gauss, I can easily compute a sum from 1 to N with the formula N * (N+1) / 2. The sum of 1 to 75 is thus 75 * 76 / 2 = 2850, and now we need to subtract off years 1 through 42, which sum to 42*43 = 903, for a final result of 2850-903 = 1947 books. My Goodreads backlog is only 99 books long, so I guess I better start adding to it. Any suggestions?
