Many of us like to imagine we are regular, adept readers who get through thousands upon thousands of pages per year—and we are! Various sources suggest that reading anywhere between ten-to-twenty standard length books per year places you well above the average person, so well done with that.
But, as I outlined in an older post that focused on the upper limit of what we can possibly read in a year (spoiler: it’s realistically about 60-80), we should approach the act of reading with the knowledge that it is simply impossible to read every book in full. Even reading every book written/published in English on a particularly niche topic could take the better part of a lifetime, assuming there is at least a few hundred books.
Still, I’d like to exercise my pessimistic streak and affirm the reality that, no matter how hard you try, there is no way you’re reading close to one percent of all books published thus far.
Human Limits & Boredom
We are humans, and humans get bored. Everybody has some life-long passions and interests, but most of us still suffer burnout on those as other, more important things beckon our attention away, or we simply fall into a rut where dopamine is temporarily unachievable. That is a fact of life for almost any normal person.
If you set out with the admirable, but ultimately foolish, goal of reading as many books as possible, I guarantee you would get sick of it very quickly. In fact, the act of making it such a daunting, time-consuming goal would align it more with the idea of being a duty, not a hobby.
Equally, let’s say you enjoy reading about travel, and decided to read five hundred travel books within the next decade. You’d start out fine, learning more and more about the world and satiating your curiosity, but then the impassioned flame within you would flutter out like a candle in the wind. You would be bored. Bored of the world, bored of your fifth read about the same old in a similar location that some other book already touched about. I like the United State’s national parks, I do want to visit plenty of them, but I don’t think I could read about them for even a month straight.
Variety is the spice of life, and variation is the flavour of reading. If you read about the same topic, or even confine yourself to the slightly broader spectrum of the same genre of books, you are bound to grow bored. Film enjoyers can’t watch the same film over and over, not even the same series; video gamers can’t play the same game for a whole year straight; and music enthusiasts can’t listen to just one artist their whole life.
Readers should learn and enjoy many things through the transformative media that is literature (and perhaps the photography and analytical data that accompanies it in some non-fiction works); constraining the freedom’s afforded by literature and writing seems daft and insulting towards the purpose of books. That purpose? To inform, to entertain, or to simply provide entertainment and/or escapism.
The human limits, namely our attention span and proneness to mental fatigue, can be hindering annoyances. But, in my opinion, they can also be positive barriers that encourage us to explore and diversify our interests. Regarding the topic of reading every book, your brain would melt. I’d wager anyone attempting such a thing would, at minimum, be dejected. At worst, they’d go mad, perhaps even commit suicide.
Self-Publishing & Author Output
Books have become less of a closed market, which initially sounds good, but has led to a lot of trite and near-talentless fiction making its way onto online platforms (namely Kindle), as well as appearing in print form inside reputable book-selling shops.
Let me emphasise that there are many great self-published works, or self-published works that enabled talented authors to land publisher-backed writing jobs, but the floodgates have now opened… anyone is a writer, and that’s not always a good thing.
For every proofread, fact-checked novel that is published after years of effort from an author, editing team, and beta readers, there are a dozen flawed self-published works flooding the market.
Whilst I personally don’t think many of these works are worth reading, and I am sure you probably feel the same, it does pose one major and obvious problem for the topic at hand. If even twice as many books are being published per year, that is theoretically twice as many books one would have to read to stay level with the world’s output. It’s even twice as many to read if one, let’s say, just wanted to read one percent of what had been published across that year.
Considering sources now suggest anywhere between 500,000–1,000,000 books are published per year, that would mean the one-percenters would have to read approximately 5,000–10,000 books each year. In that post published in December, 1,000 books was outlined as an extremely unrealistic, effectively impossible aspiration.
One percent of the book world’s output in a year is already more than what basically any human being would read in their entire lifetime, even if they lived to be a centenarian.
Collecting & Sourcing Books (Plus Cost)
Books are expensive, and there are many editions of works that contain tweaks, extras, tiny edits, or a foreword or afterward etc.
Even if you sailed the high seas and acquired pirated PDF copies of every book ever written (an impossible feat to begin with), then you must ask yourself first, how are you cataloguing them? How much storage space would that take? How are you going to track your progress with each book? So many questions before you even begin reading a single work.
Moreover, physical books would only compound these complications. You would need cubic miles of space to store every book, a team of people to organise and categorise everything, and a bottomless pit of money to afford every book, the storage space, and the many people helping you out. Not even billionaires could dream of this, it bothers governments to not even close libraries nowadays (in spite of all the tax money they take and pledge to put into the community).
There are many books that have been lost to time. And, even for ones that are very scarce in copies now, there is no guarantee that the text within is even publicly accessible. As I said, it is wholly impossible.
Childhood & Lifespan
The earlier you start, the more books you will be able to read in life. But, now more than ever, children are reading fewer books. Sure, perhaps more children have access to books than ever, but I would wager that children’s interest in literature and written exploration of topics is on a sharp decline.
I am going to assume that you read a decent bit throughout your childhood, maybe five or ten books per year, but nothing outlandish. Personally, I read quite a bit, and then I became a teenager and took little interest in books between the ages of thirteen and sixteen. It was only really when I reached seventeen that I began to rediscover my enjoyment of printed stories and factual explorations. So, if I had ambitions of reading every book ever written, there’s roughly three or more wasted years that could have been put towards this lofty goal.
On a slightly morbid note, when do you plan on dying? Most of us assume we will reach well into our seventies, eighties, perhaps even our nineties, maybe scrape into the hundreds if we are supremely lucky. But, sadly, many people die before even reaching half of their nation’s typical life expectancy, and I can bet almost all of them had no intention or knowledge that they would die at such an age.
If, for easiness sake, you live to one hundred, how many years did you waste? Perhaps you didn’t take up reading as a hobby until your thirties, so there goes three decades of potential time. But, it’s also not really three decades, because most of us don’t really begin to astutely read until we’re in primary/elementary school, so we can really say that meaningful reading begins from the age of five.
If you started at five and never stopped, and died at age one hundred, that’s ninety-five years of solid reading. That’s a lot, but not nearly enough to even get close to a percentage point of what has been published across the past century, let alone humanity’s whole career of writing and publishing. So, if you live a more typical life and only get into reading at age twenty, the die at seventy-five, that was only fifty-five years of reading. Much less.
This should really hammer home the point that, no matter how many hours you dedicate to it, you will never read everything ever put out there. If you spent your lifetime reading, then picture the literary world as a beach, you could maybe argue you read a grain of sand’s worth of books. Simply put, that’s a pathetically small amount compared to the total volume of books that have been released, which should really put into perspective how futile this goal is.
So, no, don’t dedicate your whole life to it. Even if you started reading in the womb and died at one hundred, reading one percent of humanity’s output would be impossible. So don’t even think about starting now, save yourself the embarrassment.
And that brings me to the conclusion. Was this post a little pointless? Yes. Was anyone really considering the possibility or reality of reading every book ever written and published? I would like to think not.
But this website, with its miniscule footprint in the boundless land of the Internet, is dedicated to all things books. When these slightly amusing, whimsical ideas come to me in the dead of night, I perceive it as my self-proclaimed role to explore these rather ridiculous ideas, even if only for my own entertainment.
The reality is, you will never read every book ever written. If you live to be a hundred, you could probably read 1,000–2,000 books at most. It all depends on what you read, how quickly you read, the length of what you read, and how long you can sustain your passion for reading.
If you are having trouble honing what you want to read, perhaps check out this post on the slightly depressing reality that—on a reader-by-reader basis—the vast majority of books are not worth one’s time or money. In essence, you should enjoy what you read, and read quality works instead of fixating on the quantity of works you read.
For those who enjoy being educated, half a dozen books on a particular topic is more than enough to give you better knowledge on that specific subject than what most uninformed others will be able to comprehend anyway. Don’t spend a lifetime down one rabbit hole, unless you really enjoy being down there.
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