Halfway through 2025, I finished approximately 45 books, around 14,000 pages total. Average book length: 322 pages. Average reading week: 534 pp/wk. By end of year I might get through 100 books, depending on their length.
Since 2018, when I began seriously researching violence and anthropology, and whatever related topics, I’ve read a total of 300 books. That’s a bit fewer than one per week, but in 2018-2021 I only read sporadically. My reading rate increased in 2022, and in 2024 I began reading 25,000 pages per year.
Before 2018, disregarding children’s picture books, comic books, etc., I probably read 75 at school and maybe 50 in my free time. That’s a total of 425 books in my entire life. That seems unimpressive, but people are generally impressed with the amount of reading I’ve done. I’m now 43, maybe just short of halfway through life. Is it impressive for a man to read one thousand books in his life? It doesn’t seem like it…
I want to read far more than 1000 books in my life. The total number of books in publication is roughly 150 million. Let’s be very conservative and assume that only 10 million of these are books you might find in a bookstore (assume the remaining 140 million are one-offs, super-specific stuff nobody would bother buying or selling like membership rolls at the Elks Lodge, etc.). When I go to a used bookstore, assuming there are ~2000 books for sale, I usually buy 5 or so, which is 0.25% of books worth selling. So, I’m interested in reading 25,000 of them. I read two books a day for the next 40 years, I could get through all 25,000 books. But at my current reading rate of roughly 100 books per year, I could only get through maybe 5,000 books, or 20% of the ones I want to read.
Reading a book per day is very hard. I’ve done it once or twice… Once with Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s Starry Messenger, once with Simon Baron-Cohen’s The Pattern Seekers, both of which were easy to speed read because their content was so predictable. Speed-reading fiction is easier, but I sometimes like taking my time with fiction. And meaningfully reading a Descent of Man or an Immanuel Kant book in a single day is impossible.
One option is to outsource most of my reading to AI. Maybe I could only read 2-20% of the above books, take notes as usual, and pass the other 80-98% into AI and ask it to lecture me daily on whatever is relevant to the notes I’ve taken. But, I don’t expect I’d really be able to digest the content this way very well. A better option would be to ask AI to summarize books for specific things (books, presentations, vid essays, etc.) and give relevant anecdotes and quotes.
Of course, publishing will only increase as self-publishing gets easier. I’ll want to read a lot of those too. I might assume this doubles the number of books I’ll want to read in my life.
It makes me wonder, how were people “well-read” in the past? What did “well-read” mean? Did kids read 50 full books per year? 20? 10? Did adults read 2-3 books per week? Did they dedicate 4-6 hours per day to do this? It seems only a researcher could have had the luxury to do that. Being “well-read” might have only meant reading 100-200 “classics”, maybe 200-300 books related to one’s profession, and maybe 50 miscellaneous books for fun (fiction, peers’ work, etc.). That’s a total of 350-550 books in the lifetime for the classically “well-read.” Roughly where I am now.
(Interestingly, I find I’m still mostly illiterate in the “classics.” I haven’t finished The Republic or Homer yet, I’ve never read St. Augustine, and I can’t tell you the plot of any Shakespeare story beyond Romeo and Juliet, but I’m planning to read all these. Other classics are out: no Dickens, no German philosophy, sorry not sorry. )
How important are the “classics” and what are they? One might argue that Homer, Plato, Herodotus, Tacitus, and others are prerequisites for understanding medieval and enlightenment writing (Descartes, Rousseau, Hume, etc.), which were necessary before reading Darwin, Huxley, etc., who were necessary before reading Ardrey, Campbell, Gimbutas, etc. And that’s just the West, and it’s only nonfiction.
After reading Thorndike’s History of Magic and Experimental Science series, I became more interested in reading the “classics” of science, but how much of this is necessary? How important is Galen? The Principia? Do modern scientists read these? I have a hunch that modern chemists don’t read any of the medieval alchemists like Albertus Magnus, Raymond Llull, or Arnold of Villanova, but reading these would reveal the origins of the experimental method. How many computer science majors read Leibniz, Boole, Babbage, or Turing? Do they read even 10% of “classic” works on the foundations of logic? I suspect that a WWII cryptographer would have read those, but a modern comp-sci major probably doesn’t even read 1% of them. Perhaps being “well-read” today has a lower level of qualification than it once did.
I assume that fiction 1) can be read much more quickly, 2) is less important to take notes on, and 3) is 10-1000x more extraneous than nonfiction. It seems safe to limit myself only to official canons, like the Everyman’s Library, Great Books of the Western World, and Harvard Classics, which seem to range from 50-100 volumes. This could easily be read in a single year.
Of course these compendia—and compendia of nonfiction “classics”—are of books authored by history’s winners, a kind of Criterion Collection that paints history as progressing along a certain narrative arriving at The Now. Call it The Vector. The Vector is an historical fiction; there are really infinite vectors, even within one’s own society, even within one’s own institution, but an individual’s attention can only follow one of them. The Vector is defined as the most powerful one. The Vector is the side that won. These are the airport books.
The Vector Reader’s job is to study and propagate the Vector. The Vector makes this easy: it filters out all the non-Vector books, which is 99.9999% of it all. Basically everything. The Vector publishes the great compendia. The Great Works of Shakespeare, Darwin, Oxford Anthropologists, etc. There is no Great Works of the Dictators, Autocrats, and Reactionaries of Our Days. No Great Confederate, Eugenic, Enochian, or Geocentric Works.
But non-Vector works are mostly still available, and they’re mostly free. And I want to read them. Ideally, for every 2 of history’s winners, one should read at least 1 of history’s losers. When you read, you are sparring with the author. Think of it like a boxer sparring with his opponent’s fight tapes. A good reader is constantly asking himself whether the author has any truth advantage over his own views. A bad reader will discount the author simply because he’s not on the Vector. If you think this, then perhaps you’re satisfied ignoring these works entirely. You’re on the content treadmill then. But content treadmills are the death of reading. They turn into clothes hangers after a few weeks. Boxers and cats live for the same thing, as do readers. Most people don’t like reading because they’re not hunting. Read Mein Kampf and The Unabomber Manifesto. Spar madmen, and you will find the fight in you again.
Unless you’re afraid of becoming a Nazi terrorist, then perhaps the treadmill is for you.
I don’t expect many of the “well-read” in academia would do well in a debate against a well-read madman. But someone who’s sparred madmen is very prepared.
Contrast two martial art students: a Thai boxer, who invites kickboxers and jiujitsu practitioners to spar for a year; and a Wing Chun sifu, who trains wooden dummy and sticky hands for all his waking life. The boxer will become a Swiss army knife overnight, and the sifu will become a master of the Vector. Do you want to be a Swiss army knife? Or a Vector Reader?
I won’t get through every book I want to read, so I’m still looking for ways to expedite the reading process. I have a feeling AI and app-building is a good first step.