Life is short so it saddens me to see people read mediocre books at the expense of the best literature has to offer.
Of course, I have thoughts on what books are not worth the pulp they are printed on, but let’s take my personal preferences out of the equation (for this post at least) and adopt a more universal definition of a ‘bad book’:
A book is not worth reading if, upon your deathbed, you would have rather read something else.
Let’s ignore the impossibility of hindsight and time-travel involved in such a framing to focus on the idea that poor book selection often stems from a sort of framing bias (as opposed to a difficulty finding worthwhile books). The problem is people tend to forget that their time is finite and read under the assumption that they will have time to read all the books they want.
That is not the case. There are an estimated 5 million books to read and while the vast majority are probably not worth reading, there are still more pages to read than days to read them.
How many more books will you read before you die? It depends on two variables–how long you will live and how frequently you read–so a sensitivity table is a helpful way to visualize the data:
Regardless of how young you are and how fast you read, you will run out of time to read everything. Hopefully, these results may inspire you to read more and be more selective, but please do not let them make reading less fun. Be sure to take the time to thoughtfully craft a list of books to read, but also save room for more ‘mindless’ beach-reads, recommendations from friends, and bookstore discoveries.
Read well 🙂
Appendix
My Methodology
- Lifespan is copied from US Social Security Administration
- Women live longer than men on average. I used the male lifespan to increase the sense of urgency
- Your actual lifespan will differ based on your unique circumstances
- Your healthspan will likely be less than your lifespan and you may be unable to read well in your later years
- Lengths of book vary and this is not taken into account
References
I wrote this post because I wanted to know the answer and other people that answered this question did so unsatisfactorily. Still I am grateful to them for laying the foundation:
- Lithub: poor visualization and shows too few reading frequencies. Also mean is used instead of median
- Economist: cool approach, but assumes a rather slow reading frequency and that someone would only want to read ‘the classics’
- Pew: highlighting the difference between mean and median. These numbers are from 2016; I suspect they would dip significantly in 2023