How many books do you read? On average.

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Inanna
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How many books do you read? On average.

Post by Inanna »

So, kindle tracks the books you’ve read. At least the new books, or books borrowed from the library. It does not note books that you own and re-read.

Just killing time, I looked at my stuff on the kindle app. With some corrections (it didn’t mark as read the ones I read with the WiFi off in India) - kindle tracked me as having read 92 books in 2019. Add Expanse, Ursula Guin and Pratchetts that I own & re-read, I’m at 100+.

Which is what R had estimated once. But still. And even he asked “Did you do anything else?” ;)

And of course, I did. So.... how about our other book lovers, here? What’s the estimate?
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yovargas
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Re: How many books do you read? On average.

Post by yovargas »

I genuinely don't understand how it's even possible to read that much even if you spend all of your free time reading! You must genuinely read several multiple times faster than me!
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Impenitent
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Re: How many books do you read? On average.

Post by Impenitent »

I don't know. I get through 2 books a week during busy times; when work is less hectic or I'm on break it can be 3 or 4.

Some are re-reads. I recently read The Sharing Knife series by Lois McMaster Bujold, which I really enjoyed and fed my appetite to revisit her Vorkosigan books, so I'm three books into a re-read of that series.

Prim turned me onto Bujold, by the way.

I read all the time. While drinking my morning coffee, while prepping food, while cooking, while showering, while dressing, while knitting, while walking, while eating lunch at work - and in the middle of the night when I wake with my head buzzing and can't sleep.

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Maria
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Re: How many books do you read? On average.

Post by Maria »

I listen to audiobooks so I can do stuff with my hands at the same time. Audible sent me an email last month saying I'd listened to audiobooks over 2000 hours last year, with 62 new titles added. Now, we can probably halve the number of hours, because my husband and I listen on the same account. But that's the numbers they gave me.

They also sent an email last month telling me there are 454 books in my audible account. We started with them in 2012, so that's an average of almost 57 books per year. A few get dropped after just a little while for whatever reason, but the majority get listened to from start to finish. We are on a 24 books per year plan, so all extras are usually gotten when audible has a sale going on.
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Re: How many books do you read? On average.

Post by RoseMorninStar »

I used to be a voracious reader, mostly historical fiction. When I became a (working) mom I had no time for reading except children's books. As our daughter got older I read every book she was required to read for school (or books she wanted to read for pleasure) so we could discuss them. Somewhere along the way the internet happened and most of my reading was done online; fact checking, looking up things that I was curious about, research, that sort of thing. That said, the reason I stumbled on to 'The Hobbit' is because my daughter was just the right age when the Harry Potter books hit it big and I enjoyed reading those so much (I had not been a reader of fantasy/fiction prior to that) I wondered what other tales I may have missed and picked up a copy of 'The Hobbit', then LotR, then the Sil. I suppose the most recent series I've read is probably 'Game of Thrones'. I love re-reading favorites and I've got a few things on my kindle but I'm not fond of reading on my kindle. Checking things out from our library (onto the kindle) doesn't seem to go well either.

While I love to read, I'd really like to get back into my painting/artwork.
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Re: How many books do you read? On average.

Post by narya »

Impenitent wrote:I read all the time. While drinking my morning coffee, while prepping food, while cooking, while showering, while dressing, while knitting, while walking, while eating lunch at work - and in the middle of the night when I wake with my head buzzing and can't sleep.
While showering? Are these waterproof books? :roll:

Sad to say, I read very few books because my eyes just don't cooperate.

On the other hand, I'm a voracious "reader" of podcasts - several hours a day. And I can listen while I bike, drive, hike, or do chores. Sometimes I do non-verbal puzzles like Sudoku while listening to a podcast, to keep the other side of my brain busy.

I enjoy the speculative fiction short story podcasts Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Clarkesworld, Escape Pod, Lightspeed, and Podcastle. Non-fiction story podcasts include The Moth and Story Collider. I round those out with non-fiction info podcasts on science, history, comedy, politics, and mixes thereof, including several from Australia. Y algunos en español, también.
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Re: How many books do you read? On average.

Post by RoseMorninStar »

Oh yeah.. I find that reading messes with my eyes too. :(
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Maria
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Re: How many books do you read? On average.

Post by Maria »

When I was being treated for Lyme disease is when I basically gave up on print. From what I learned back then, it is common for Lyme patients to have problems with large blocks of text. The lines keep kind of jumping up and down. :suspicious: When I realized that what my brain was doing, I went whole hog for audiobooks. I still read one or two print books a year, when it's a book I can't get in audible format- but almost everything else is audio for me.

Like I said, it lets me do stuff with my hands, too. :D Every manual task, chore or hobby I do is accompanied by a story. I make little crocheted net bags to put my phone in and hang around my neck for that purpose.

I recently signed up for that 3 months of kindle unlimited on Amazon for $0.99, hoping for good audiobooks. It turns out there is a real dearth of books offered that have both reading AND listening for free. And they are super hard to find. Amazon just doesn't sort that way! :bang:

I finally found an author with an urban fantasy series that offered both reading and listening. Steve McHugh. The first couple of books of the Hellequin series were fairly good, but I soon got tired of the endless violence. He was OK with character development and plotting, but seemed to think a fight scene every half hour was mandatory or something. :roll:

After not finding anything else, I gave up on kindle unlimited and signed up for Audible's "Escape" program. All you care to listen to love stories for a set price per month. So I sorted the Escape book list for science fiction and fantasy and then by average reader reviews. The top of the list was described as a story about dragon shape shifters. I'm not crazy about the shifter genre, but some series I absolutely love- like the Mercy Thompson series. And often such books are marketed as love stories when they are just straight fantasy tales with a dash of romance.

Not this one. :shock: Yeah, I've run across soft porn in novel form before, but this was worse than usual. Just like the McHugh books were a story serving as a framework for linking fight scenes, this book seemed to be just an excuse for one sexual encounter after another. No character development. No apparent plot. Just an overwhelming attraction for the person they'd just met and waaaaayy too explicit sex scenes. :roll: Not that I object to sex by book characters, but there is a point where it's just TMI.

I quit that one and started paying attention to the "hotness" rating in the Escape library. Since the spectrum is from "sweet" to "flirty" to "seductive" to "sexy" and then "red hot"-- and the one I threw back was "sexy" I resolved to find something in the "flirty" category in the space opera category. I've got a couple of candidates downloaded right now and am trying one of them out. The first one is read by the author! While he does a good job on voices, the recording is a bit tinny and that's distracting at first. I don't think he had access to a professional sound recording studio.

Anyway, that's where i am now. For years my husband and I would listen to books together and when we are apart, relisten to old favorites separately. I've gotten bored with relistening lately, and want new tales. Hence, my foray into all you can listen to land.
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Re: How many books do you read? On average.

Post by narya »

If you are looking for urban fantasy on Audible, you might try the series The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher. Tolerable amounts of combat, lots of clever adventure. It's best to start from the beginning of the series (Storm Front) because he sometimes makes remarks about previous adventures in later books. Butcher does tend to be pretty merciless with his characters, though, especially in the later part of this series. From what I've sampled, his other series are quite awful.
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Maria
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Re: How many books do you read? On average.

Post by Maria »

I'm a lonnnnnggggg time Harry Dresden fan. :) We've still got half of the series in print from before we started audiobooks. :)

The Hellequin books are very much an imitator of Harry Dresden, with extra loads of violence thrown in.

I didn't like Jim Butcher's other books, either.
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Inanna
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Re: How many books do you read? On average.

Post by Inanna »

Awesome; I’ll make a note of Dresden.

My BEST series reads last year were:
Ann Leckie
Martha Wells
N.K. Jemisin

All three came via Prim, and Leckie and Jemisin are just spectacular!

I also read all 10-12 books or more written by Sarah J Maas - YA. Easy reads, minor soft porn. Usual stuff.

Yov, to your point, books like the Sarah Maas’ series are a lot of flip,flip,flip...still sex scene! Flip, flip flip.

Which is why I found Witcher so confusing. I flipped through battle scenes and kept losing people.
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Re: How many books do you read? On average.

Post by Frelga »

Speaking of listening to books, I got a lot of housework done listening to Neil Gaiman reading the Graveyard Book on YouTube. He is an amazing reader, and as the author, he brings out the nuances of the text that I may have overlooked on reading.

Sadly, my other sources of YouTube book listening, Mark Oshiro, is on hiatus following a personal loss. But there are weeks of listening on his channel, including the entire Discworld through Snuff.
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Re: How many books do you read? On average.

Post by RoseMorninStar »

I'm not sure if this is the right place to post this, but the NYTimes published an article for Valentines day called '50 States of Love' listing a heartwarming 'must read' from each state. Some picks are well known (Alabama-Forest Gump) and others, less so. The pick for Alaska sounds so intriguing.. and then I caught the name of the author and I thought those here might appreciate it.
Alaska
Éowyn Ivey, “The Snow Child”

“A childless couple struggling to adapt to the harsh Alaskan wilderness in the 1920s are heartened by the arrival of a young girl who hovers between reality and fantasy,” the Times review said of Ivey’s “evocative retelling of a Russian fairy tale."
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Inanna
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Re: How many books do you read? On average.

Post by Inanna »

Oh, thank you! I will look at that list.
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Re: How many books do you read? On average.

Post by RoseMorninStar »

I read: Éowyn Ivey, “The Snow Child” I enjoyed the story, especially the first, oh.. 3/4 of the book. I'm uncertain how I feel about the ending.
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Re: How many books do you read? On average.

Post by Alatar »

There's an author called Éowyn?
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Frelga
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Re: How many books do you read? On average.

Post by Frelga »

Alatar wrote:There's an author called Éowyn?
It could even be a real name. There have been a few babies with Tolkien names every year since the movies came out. Éowyn, Arwen, Théoden....
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Re: How many books do you read? On average.

Post by Dave_LF »

But babies can't write *books* and... oh right. The passage of time.
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Re: How many books do you read? On average.

Post by Voronwë the Faithful »

Éowyn Ivey was born in 1973, so she wasn't named after the movies came out. But there actually were books before there were movies, and they were pretty popular. Just sayin'.

Ivey was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2013 for her debut novel, The Snow Child.
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Re: How many books do you read? On average.

Post by Frelga »

Voronwë the Faithful wrote:But there actually were books before there were movies, and they were pretty popular. Just sayin'
Right, I forgot they published novelizations before the movies even came out. =:)

Anyone here remembers Sue Tolkien?
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