Do We Really Need More Books!
There’s a scene in the 2012 British dark comedy Sightseers in which Ian boasts to the hapless protagonist Chris that he’s on his third novel.
Chris — still scribbling his first — then proceeds to bludgeon Ian to death with a rock.
I don’t know what he was thinking — he probably just hated him. But maybe he realized that one less author meant one less book. (Or three).
Some nerd at Google calculated there are 130 million published books in the world — excluding self-published ones.
That’s a lot of books.
It takes me roughly a week to read a book. Meaning it would take me 2.5 million years to finish all those ever published.
I’m 47 now so let’s say I make it to 80. That leaves me 33 years to read 130 million books.
In short, I don’t have the time. And neither do you.
So why do people keep writing them?
I was halfway through Kurt Vonnegut’s Timequake yesterday when this thought hit me.
Vonnegut wrote fourteen novels in his life, and I’ve read five of them (including Slaughterhouse-5). I enjoy Vonnegut and I want to read more. I also want to read more Delillo, Auster, Self. Melville, Zola, Camus.
