How Many Books Have You Read This Year?
and Should the Answer Matter?
Here’s the thing, I am a BookTok lurker. I love to follow all my fellow readers and get inspiration for new authors, titles, or genres. And I have long admired the book influencers and professional readers on BookTok who can read a book in a day and amass annual reading lists that get into the triple digits. But I’ve always been a bit intimidated by that as well. I track the number of books I read annually and have yet to exceed 48 (which I am very proud of, by the way). But life is busy. Between work, errands, spending time with friends and family, and getting my stupid 10,000 steps in every day, I’m just happy to have free time to read at all.
But I’ve long wondered if my annual book count should even really matter to me. Is that a standard that anyone else really cares about? I’ve come to think it’s not.
Case in point:
Last year I finished The Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons. It consists of 4 books; Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, Endymion, and The Rise of Endymion. Each book has a minimum of 496 pages with the longest being 720 pages. It is a time-bending sci-fi saga that takes place across dozens of different worlds with two entirely separate casts of characters so the plot naturally calls for a lot of story telling.
It took me about three months to read all of them. When I finally finished the series, I knew my book count for the year would be permanently thrown off by this endeavor. I would have usually read about 10 books in that amount of time. At first I was a little disappointed by this. But then I realized that I wouldn’t have wanted to miss out on experiencing the iconic and mind-bending saga of The Hyperion Cantos either way and quickly let go of regret.
But that got me wondering… was there another way to measure this as an accomplishment? I had only read four books but had poured over so many words and pages doing so. I was promptly shocked to realize that I had read just shy of one million words (The Hyperion Cantos book series clocks in at a total of approximately 844,165 words). To make some cursory comparisons, that is 268,809 more words than The Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Hobbit combined (totaling approximately 575,356 words) and only 240,005 less words than all seven books of the Harry Potter series (totaling approximately 1,084,170 words).
And with this information, I felt like reading these four books in just three months was actually the biggest feat on my reading list for the year.
Now, this whole exercise is not to advocate for some sort of new reading race as to who can clock the most words each year. I would be right back where I started with the whole annual book count envy and would surely lose that race as well. It takes as many words as needed to tell a story the way it should be told and no one is doing any word count shaming here. This is just to say that, for anyone like me who feels lacking if they can’t fit 100+ books into their repertoire each year, there are other measures of a fruitful year of reading.
So don’t let comparison be the thief of your reading joy. If you are reading books you enjoy then your reading list for the year will never truly be lacking regardless of the final tally.
