How many books do you own?

@kickycan,

I've read most of the books I've saved, and probably all of those given away - though I still haven't knocked off Machiavelli, being stuck in the introduction, so from what I said before, 1400 - and then there's all the books I either sold back to used book stores or gave to thrifts, say 1000, totally 2400 - say, 10% = 2160, and that sounds way low.

Trying it another way, books per week and my age - 12 = 55 years and one book a week, that'd be 2860; however, I've very often read 2 or more a week, sooooo, 2860 x 1.5 = 4,230. Ok, round it up to 5,000.

I would have saved a lot of money if I only used libraries, but... I like my books at hand. The majority of mine have been from used book emporia, though.

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@kickycan,

kickycan wrote:

Okay, next question: How many books have you read? All-time total.

Starting at teen-age, I'd say about 1200 full books.

But my main reading has been magazines, a lot of magazines, specialized articles and newspapers, a lot of newspapers... and lately a lot in the internet.

My educated guess is Gargamel -1

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@fbaezer,

kickycan wrote:

Okay, next question: How many books have you read? All-time total.

Oh good grief...thousands, I guess.

I did 8 years of uni...including Honours in English.....I still read a lot for pleasure and work....sometimes I would have been reading 5 or 6 books a week just for study.....at least.

And I read a LOT as soon as I COULD read......we'd get a pile of library books every week.

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I could not guess how many books I have read all the way through. I have also begun dozens that I did not finish, for various reasons.

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@dlowan,

Books read in Uni don't count!
Or shouldn't; they're compulsory.

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Between my husband and I we have about 1200 actual books, that's not including all the tech manuals my husband has (150) my comic book collection (about 500), his RPG books (200) and then my art and photography books (80).

Oh, and we have a Sony reader that has about 17,397 e-books. Some of those may be redundant titles from our actual books but certainly not all of them.

My husband speaks and reads in Russian, English, Japanese, Latin, German and Mongolian and we both read anything and everything we can get our hands on, so we have accumulated this over our lifetimes and then combined it all when we got hitched. Neither one of us can ever get rid of a book they are sacred to us.

So that's 1930 physical books and then all the ebooks. Wow. We have a lot of books...

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Books that I have READ?! There is no way. I know hubby has read every single book and ebook that we own. I have read most of them (still working my way through some of his) at least the english ones. I can read some German, but not enough to get through a novel.

I also read the dictionary from time to time just to switch it up a bit.

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@fbaezer,

Lots of them weren't.

So yah boo sucks to you, mexican person.

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@kickycan,

Several hundred and accumulating more all the time. Seriously this summer I must find a way to part (Donate) with many so that others can enjoy.

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@dlowan,

And even the ones that were "compulsory" just don't seem as compulsory as reading in other fields (engineering or whatever). I mean I was like "We get to read 'Northanger Abbey,' yay!"

This is the central freakiness of English majors. We love this stuff, all of it, and if we didn't we'd move to a major that offered some career prospects.

As for how many books I've read... noooo idea. I worked in a used bookstore for several years with a stock of probably 25,000 fiction titles and I usually had something to say about a given title when a customer asked...

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@sozobe,

Lol!!! Some of it was pretty drudgerous.

We formed a very tight knit group because we did honours work for 3 years together, instead of 1.

There was so much pretty average stuff we were supposed to read for background...like hundreds of ho-hum plays and poetry and such...that, to the horror of our elders and betters (who had grown up to believe in secrecy and intense competition) we shared the load by each reading tons of the bad stuff, and writing up and circulating what we called "potted plots".

These were outlines of the works, with salient quotes, and brief historical and critical comments.

But, it was, indeed, a great joy to read many wonderful things and be working at the same time!

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@dlowan,

Nifty!

I don't remember much drudgery. I think I quit when I was ahead -- got to do all the fun stuff as an undergrad, got my BA with honors (I didn't have to do anything extra to get it, just a function of my grades), then decided NOT to go to grad school in English (went for the career prospects instead). The graduate students were the ones who looked haggard, though I guess all grad students look that way...

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@Robert Gentel,

Robert Gentel wrote:

Reyn,

We need to start up the a2k chess league again sometime.

I'm hopeless without a board though. I'm not that strong of a player, but enjoy the game.

I play on ChessWorld.net. I only play server-based correspondence chess, never blitz, by the way.

BillRM wrote:

Frankly I do not know how you can become even a fairly good chess player without reading books on the opening and closing game ETC.

I've read my share of chess books in my time. I've never found that they've helped me improve.

I'm more the type of person that gets better by doing/playing rather than reading.

For me, it's better to re-play old master games, or my own, for that matter, for improvement.

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@Robert Gentel,

Robert Gentel wrote:

Reyn,

We need to start up the a2k chess league again sometime.

Absolutely! I'd love to participate in such an endeavor.

Cycloptichorn

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Ok, I made it a lot easier to play chess here by adding a chess BBcode using Portable Game Notation.

e.g. notation like this:

Code:[chess]1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bc4 Nf6 4. d3 Bc5 5. c3 a6[/chess]

Will display a game like this:

There you can play back the moves, swap sides of the board, etc.

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@Robert Gentel,

Quote:

Today my girlfriend took down all my books off my shelf, getting them ready to give away as we are paring down our stuff in anticipation of moving out of Costa Rica. :-(

Sounds like you don't much want to leave....so I am sorry to hear that.

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let me see. I have a collection of art books, some date back to the 1800's - somewhere in the vicinity of 300 books, another 30 r so books about the Irish - collection of non-fiction books on archeology et al - all of my d.i..l.'s books. Someday I might count them

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@Robert Gentel,

I'm definitely interested. I would like to see this in action.

Why not have a test game, so we can see how this will work in practice?

I was going to suggest using WinBoard, but this looks like it might work okay.

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@dlowan,

dlowan wrote:

kickycan wrote:

Okay, next question: How many books have you read? All-time total.

Oh good grief...thousands, I guess.

I did 8 years of uni...including Honours in English.....I still read a lot for pleasure and work....sometimes I would have been reading 5 or 6 books a week just for study.....at least.

And I read a LOT as soon as I COULD read......we'd get a pile of library books every week.

ditto without the English degree. I can easily read 3 or 4 books a week. If I've got a vacation week, I'll plough through 20 or 30 books.

I've read thousands and thousands of books. That is definitely hamburger's fault. Just about the first adult who was my friend was the Story Hour librarian, Miss Bustard. She was lovely - still made sure to check me out when I was an adult visiting home and she was the city's head librarian.

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@ehBeth,

You know, I have a bitter-sweet library story to tell.

I have been working with three little kids...so badly neglected and generally mistreated at home that the intellectual damage is in direct relation to the number of years spent there before they were removed.

Anyhoo, they were unfosterable, and we have spent the last three years working to get them stable enough to try again...but they have to be separated.

I was talking with the eldest about the pros and cons of being fostered individually...she can barely read anything but loves books...but the HUGE thing for her (and she has been showing it to everyone) is that for the first time ever SHE HAS HER OWN INDIVIDUAL LIBRARY CARD!!!!

1 Reply

How many books do you own?

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