Life’s too short to read tedious books

‘My friend and I were working out how many more books we’ll read before we die,’ a customer said to me in the bookshop, the other day. ‘We read a book every couple of weeks, so we figured around 500.’

I rapidly did the maths. Twenty years. It seemed a little pessimistic for someone who can’t have been much older than fifty.

Those of you who feel inspired to do your own calculations might feel depressed by how few books you’ve got left, or overwhelmed by how many you’ve yet to read. At 29 years old, I’m not so far from the beginning of my reading life and it feels quite uncanny to force an endpoint on something that I think of as continuing far into the future. It feels, frankly, sad to think of all those books suddenly coming to an end. It conjures an image of a bookcase, gloriously full until about two-thirds of the way down, where the rows of spines abruptly give way to yawning emptiness, never to be filled.

Of course any number we come up with is ridiculous, for how can any of us possibly know how many books we will read? Without wanting to tempt fate, we might not be around for another twenty years, or even two.