Monday, September 27, 2010

Book maths and I can stop any time I want


I came across a brilliant idea, in which Nose in a book admits shamelessly copying Novel Insights’ post about doing some book maths. The idea is that you add up your To Be Read pile – theirs were 137 and 108 respectively - then you work out how many books you read a week or a month or a year and calculate how long it will take you to read your TBR pile as it stands.

Husband did a rather informal version of this a few weeks ago. Verbally. In a fit of pique. 

(For the second year ever I’ve kept a list of what I’m reading so I know what rate I read at but I’ve had to remove the list from the sidebar because Blogger has been playing Silly Bluggers.)

I went to my dedicated TBR bookshelves and counted the volumes. Ahem. There are 196 books on my TBR pile. Oh dear. 

Now bear in mind that I had to have tuition to get through my maths O’level so I’m not very reliable when it comes to book calculating; perhaps even my counting skills are in question. If these figures are correct – which they can’t possibly be - and I’ve read 50 books so far this year and it’s now week 39 then I read at a rate of 1.6 books per week. But by my reckoning that means those 196 books will take 122.5 weeks or 2.3 years to read. And that can’t be right.

I don’t think book maths is such a great idea any more. I think there must be something wrong with the operator.

8 comments:

Queenie said...

Book maths is a RUBBISH idea. Luckily I'm hopeless at maths - never even got the O level - so there's no point me even trying to work out mine. (And I'm sticking to that story, OK?)

Jenny Beattie said...

Quite. Being able to do maths is clearly very dangerous to one's mental health.

Liz said...

You've discovered Nose in a Book! Thought you might like her - she's a lovely person as well as an avid reader.

I'm slightly gloating over the fact that I keep my TBR pile to a minimum - banning myself from buying new books till I've got through piles of borrowed/acquired books. Think it's definitely under 10 currently.

Carol said...

Nope, I'm not even going to try this out! Especially since Uni starts again next week which means no fiction for me for a while *sigh*

C x

Lane Mathias said...

That's a very big pile.

But it's books. So numbers don't matter, right?:-)

Chris Stovell said...

I think we should introduce some physics too and stretch the amount of time available for tbr piles - then we don't need to worry about the maths!

Anonymous said...

Uh oh, yours is even bigger than my pile!

Nose in a book said...

Wordpress only just started showing me trackbacks to my blog, so sorry this is VERY delayed. What I've found worrying about the book maths is that, despite trying very hard to not buy more books for about four months now, my TBR is just as big. Granted we've had Christmas and my birthday, but that's still a little worrying. On the plus side, I cleaned out a bunch of books I suspected I would never read, so there's now a greater proportion of my TBR that I'm eagerly looking forward to reading!