2,000 Books

Thursday, 11 March 1999

Sobering realization: At my current reading speed, it takes me about a week to read a novel of significant length. I'm currently about a third of the way through, Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky, which, at 600 pages, is longer than typical. (I think of 300-400 pages as typical novel length.) I've been reading it since last Thursday, but I didn't get any reading done over the weekend because of Lunacon. Back to my point...

I'm 33 years old. Assuming the average lifespan for a male middle-class American in the late 20th century, I can expect to live for another 40 or so years. At a book a week that's 40 * 52 = 2,080. Two thousand books.

I own more than 2,000 books. These are almost all books that I've already read, so it's not like I've got a huge backlog that I'll never get through. But 2,000 just doesn't seem like very many books.

This is just a stark reminder that I'm not going to get to do everything I want to do before I die, which in turn reminds me that I did not invest my youth wisely. I certainly wasted a good-sized chunk of my 20s working for Sir Speedy. What was I thinking?

Getting into shape may give me more lifespan. (More likely it will just give me the average lifespan to which I might not otherwise live.) It ought to give me more energy too. After three weeks of slacking off on gym attendance, I'm back to working out (almost) every day.

Speaking of wasted time, the second trailer for the new Star Wars movie, The Phantom Menace, was made available over the net the other day. Jeff, one of my coworkers, downloaded it, and I've seen it twice already (and heard it another couple of times). Len's complaining that all the ships and droids look too obviously computer generated, and they should have gone back to using models. Certainly everything looks shiny and clean, in stark contrast to the krufty ships that were part of what made the original Star Wars so novel.