Not Enough Books!

[bunn]

According to the Daily Mail (OK, not the most accurate source of data) the average British person only reads 566 books in their entire lifetime! (Wish they'd asked me, I'd have pushed the average up a bit. Though having said that, I don't think I could give them accurate figures: it has to be thousands, but I haven't been counting...)

Apparently the average cigarettes per lifetime is over 77000! What are these people doing, wasting all that money on smoke when they could be buying healthy books!


John Fisher: Why Does My Dog?
Some interesting information on the effects of diet on behaviour, but rather outdated (published 1991) views on the relevance of wolf behaviour to dog behaviour. Also some quite mad stuff on dominance theory, and what in my view was a criminally irresponsible anecdote describing his recommendation for use of an electric shock collar on a greyhound. If there is one breed of dog for which the 'invisible fence' approach is even more totally inappropriate than another, it's the greyhound.

George RR Martin: Fevre Dream - Very impressed with this. GRRM does Anne Rice, only better. A vampires in New Orleans/ Mississippi river boat book: I loved it.

Ursula Le Guin: Changing Planes I'd read this before, but it seemed the perfect book to take on a tedious plane journey (and it was very tedious. Boston is FAR too far away to go for a 2-day course). I love the story of the woman who is 4 percent corn, and the Ansarac bird-people who have a developed civilisation yet still perform a seasonal migration are really inspired.

Adrian Woolfson: An Intelligent Person's Guide to Genetics. Interesting, but at the same time rather an annoying book. The historical anecdotes seemed to be in there just to show what a renaissance man the author was: I don't know if I just didn't get it, but they seemed to tie up very loosely with the science that was the point of the book. And it annoys me when species are described as 'useless weeds' or 'evolutionary dead ends', as if evolution was deliberately planned and structured to produce modern man and his possessions.

George Mackay Brown: Vinland
A story of a man of early Orkney who hitches a lift with Leif Ericsson. I wasn't entirely convinced to start with: the characters were a bit flat, I thought. But it won me over with some gorgeous descriptive writing: I now want to paint at least one of the descriptions (the description of the waxing and waning moon as a girl-woman-crone).

I'm sure I took something else as well, but I can't remember which book it was now, as I foolishly shelved it when I got back, and now it's become one of the Multitude... It may have been Le Guin's The Beginning Place, but I *thought* I read that the week before.

Comments

[rustica.livejournal.com]

Perhaps the people they surveyed have particularly short lives due to all those ciggies? :)

Otherwise, *boggles*.

Tell me it was 566 *per year* and I would be envious, but not as shocked as that being the *lifetime* figure.

Mind you, at least people manage to *quit* their cigarette addictions.... I'm not an incurable book junkie, no, not at all.

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

Actually, I'm surprised it's that high. 3% of the adult population has a literacy level lower than what's expected of a 5 or 6 year old. 20% of the adult population has a literacy level comparable to what's expected of an 11 year old, of lower. The current focus on adult literacy campaigns is on people who technically can read, just not very well. "This is the first time I've ever read a book voluntarily since school," say a lot of people attracted by the campaign, as they read their specially produced, non-threatening "Quick Read."

Plus, quite a large percentage of adult men never read books, even if they can read. Even people who call themselves avid readers in the library, often take 3 or 4 weeks to get through a single novel. They read every day, yes, but only five minutes or so at bedtime. I've heard self-styled bookworks say "three weeks is not enough to read such a thick book in," and say that the loan period should be extended to 6 weeks for anything over around 500 pages.

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

You are right, it's not that high. I got my numbers mixed up: it's actually 533.

Yes, if I were guessing in the cold light of day I probably would have guessed something like that, or lower. Emotionally, however, it seems such a small number!

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

Piffle, that was me, bunn. I seem to be logged in wrong.

[the-marquis.livejournal.com]

Well my boss only seems to read when he gpes opn holiday, I don't know if he reads on the plane or at the hotel, but he talks about reading his book for the year (!?!). But he seems to watch pretty much every televised football match.

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

I wonder, too, what they count as a "book read." A book read from cover to cover? A book you use like a reference book? If you get one recipe out of a recipe book, have you "read it"? Does it count all the pictures books that were read to you when you were 3? Stoopid survey.

[rustica.livejournal.com]

Some people call magazines "books". But I shall stop here because I can rant about that *forever*...

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

Frankly, if Bunn can't remember what the other book was that she read earlier this week, you have to wonder whether that counts...

[bunn.livejournal.com]

I will be able to remember the book, I just can't remember when I read it. My 'read' field and my 'date' field are both complete: unfortunately, my database is sloppily organised and the correlation between the two tables has been lost!

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

Not Enough Books!

This is surely a general truism - although not as much of a truism as, "Not enough bookshelf space" ;-)

[rustica.livejournal.com]

I'm actually wondering now, how to calculate the books I've read. A simple way would be to take the number that I've read over the year so far (say) and then gross it up for a lifetime. But I think that would be very misleading, because the number of books I read now is at an all time low. That's mostly because a/ I work (and unlike school they don't encourage book reading there!) and b/ I read a lot of stuff on the net. In fact, I can only offhand remember reading 8 new books so far this year, though it may be a few more. But I've read most of those several times over, plus re-reading some old favourites.

Anyway, using the above method would give a total so far of 792 books in my lifetime, which is clearly wrong!

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

I might hazard a guess at two a week, making 4,000-plus so far.

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

If you give the average British human alive today say sixty years of book reading (assuming that very young and very old people don't read much), then 566 books in a lifetime is not much less than one a month. That doesn't seem very low. It's about right for me for example. I only tend to read books in the bath and after getting into bed, and the latter is much reduced because Bunn doesn't.

I'm not including magazines in that total. I subscribe to five monthly magazines and read them all front to back. And I read a newspaper most days.

I suspect the average is boosted by people in London who have long boring commutes on public transport. Anyone else - if you're reading loads and loads of books, well you obviously aren't watching enough television!

[bunn.livejournal.com]

I do read in bed. I just prefer to do it before midnight. :-p

[smirnoffmule.livejournal.com]

John Fisher actually recanted his views on dominance theory, but unfortunately he died before he could revise any of his books. He's written a number of articles about why he changed his views, though. Personally, I really like him - I like the way he writes, and I think he explains very comprehensively why punishing aggression just doesn't work. I kind of bleep over the bits about dominance ;) Have you read any of his other books?

Also, it amuses me that you have An Intelligent Person's Guide to Genetics, since I just ordered a copy of Genetics for Dummies to help me with the biology aspects of my doggy course. Maybe one day I'll get to upgrade.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

This is the only one of his books I've read so far. I did like his writing style and on the whole I thought his recommendations seemed well reasoned (apart from the whole greyhound - sheep - invisible fence thing, which made me wonder if he'd ever actually *met* a greyhound). Mind you, I tend to find most dog training books seem to fit collies/terriers much better than sighthounds. Not that I know much about terriers.

I'm glad to hear he changed his thinking on the theoretical background, and sorry to hear he has died: I was planning to look and see if he'd written anything more recent. Are any of the articles online, do you know?

I was thinking there was an interesting conflict in this book between the 'academic' thinking and what was coming out of the the actual practical experience, so would be interested to see more up to date stuff.

Strongly suspect that 'Genetics for dummies' is a step up from 'for intelligent people' as I bet the former is bought by people who actually want to use the info, whereas the latter is definitely aimed at the popular science newspaper article type market who will never actually do anything with the info - ie, me!

[smirnoffmule.livejournal.com]

There's a lengthy but interesting article called "Understanding the behaviour of the pet dog" - I can't find it online except by subscription, but I have a copy on my hardrive. If you're interested, I could email it to you.

There's also a much lighter hearted discussion of the subject in his last book "Diary of a Dotty Dog Doctor".

[bunn.livejournal.com]

Thanks - would be interested to read that article.

I am on victoria@clareassoc.co.uk. (No point antispamming it, it's allover the net already, woe is me).

[the-marquis.livejournal.com]

Well I suppose I could go back to some of my books read posts and do the maths, but that would involve numbers and things ... but I'm pretty sure I've read more books than that.

Actually taking moving to Carlisle in mid 2002 and looking at books readily to hand in the study that we've bought and I've read since then and I'm at over 100 just in here. And that doesn't include various cartoon books like Liberty Meadows 1-3, Usagi Yojimbo 15-18 and 5 Foxtrots.

[chainmailmaiden]

Fevre Dream is great isn't it, it's one of my (many) favorite books.

too many books

[jhgowen.livejournal.com]

The statistics are probably skewed by the assumptions of the data-collectors. Once we were asked to fill in a survey on the number of books in the house. When my father said, "Oh, about 15,000" the poor guy gulped a bit, and said that the highest category he could tick was "over 500".