How Many Books Will You Read Before You Die? (2024)

There are millions of books in the world (and almost definitely hundreds of millions—last they checked, Google had the count at 129,864,880, and that was seven years ago). The rabid and/or competitive readersamong you will now be asking yourselves: yes, yes, now howwill I read them all?

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Well, you won’t.

Okay, so we all accept that mortality is bearing down on us—though it should be said that oneof the mental tricks that makes it possible for us to exist as mortal beings without going completely insane is that we actually experience time as infinite, even though we know it isn’t. That is, barring an execution date or a known terminal illness, we wake up every morning assuming we’ll also wake up the next morning, until one morningwe don’t—and on that morning, we don’t know it. Because we’re dead. So if we accept that the world we live in is a subjective construct made up of our perceptions, we’re actually all immortal—we live forever within the context of reality we’ve created for ourselves, because when we die, so does that reality. Doesn’t that make all this a little better?

No, it does not. My to-read list is tantalizingly endless, and I often find myself thinking about the fact that my reading time/life is finite whenI’m trying to get through a book that I know I should like but is boring (or annoying) me. As Hari Kunzru put it recently in the New York Times Book Review: “I used to force myself to finish everything I started, which I think is quite good discipline when you’re young, but once you’ve established your taste, and the penny drops that there are only a certain number of books you’ll get to read before you die, reading bad ones becomes almost nauseating.”

Consider this adropping of the penny, for any of you who were still clutching it.

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But how many more books willyou get to read?It depends, of course, on how you’re counting, but for our purposes here, it’s down totwo primary factors.

The first factor is obvious: how long will you live? To estimate the dateof all of our deaths, I used the Social Security Life Expectancy Calculator, despite the fact that this is essentially an online quiz where at the end the government tells you when you’re going to die. Fun! NB: I have rounded the data up or down where appropriate. Don’t worry—you probably wouldn’teven have noticedthose extra months of life anyway.

The second factor is: how quickly do you read? Or perhaps more accurately, how many books do you get throughper year? According to the Pew Research Center, the average American reads 12 books peryear—but knowing, as I do, the approximatemakeup of the people who are likely tobe looking at this space right now, I’ve made “Average” the low end of the range below. “Voracious” here indicates 50 books read per year, or a little less than one per week (“voracious” readers have been known to undertake projects like Infinite Jest or similar), and “super” indicates 80. Super-super readers like Sarah Weinmanwill just have to make their own calculations.

So with these two factors in mind, you can nowamplify your nausea—and honestly, the more you read, the more nauseated your number is likely to make you—by checking the table below and findingout exactly how many books you’ll (probably) read before you (probably) die. Now… isn’tthis a fun game?

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25 and female: 86 (61 years left)
Average reader: 732
Voracious reader: 3,050
Super reader: 4,880

25 and male: 82 (57 years left)
Average reader: 684
Voracious reader: 2,850
Super reader: 4,560

30 and female: 86 (56 years left)
Average reader: 672
Voracious reader: 2,800
Super reader: 4,480

30 and male: 82 (52 years left)
Average reader: 624
Voracious reader: 2,600
Super reader: 4,160

35 and female: 86 (51 years left)
Average reader: 612
Voracious reader: 2,550
Super reader: 4,080

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Emily Temple

Emily Temple is the managing editor at Lit Hub. Her first novel, The Lightness, was published by William Morrow/HarperCollins in June 2020. You can buy it here.

https://www.emilytemple.net/

How Many Books Will You Read Before You Die? (2024)

Emily Temple

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