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Comment by s0rr0wskill | Hacker News Reader

How much do you read weekly? This is an impressive amount of stuff

First the minimum time: - audiobooks while commuting (mostly walking to work). Even if it's like 30-40 minutes some day at most, it still adds up. - add to that lets say ~15 minutes each night before sleeping.

And on top of that: - sleepless nights, when you want to get back to sleep: 30 minutes - ... - just having a good series to grind through. - audiobooks during some manual labor (home restoration works for example).

So for me audiobooks + capability to read at night without disturbing others (dark mode + backlight on e-reader). And from that it adds up.

This comment slightly terrifies me. My reading has dipped this year, but generally this is a small amount of reading for 12 months. I think the norm on reading quantity has shifted.

Is social media to blame? TikTok and meta videos are extremely addictive. I have perhaps the strongest willpower of anyone I know, and the only way I can avoid losing hours to them every day is to delete these apps from all devices, and have a separate browser on my Mac for them.

Don’t be terrified, it just sounds like you read a lot. Many of these books are huge, most people definitely wouldn’t finish then all in a year.

I do not read a lot. I know people who do. That’s why I’m terrified.

I’d say 12 books a year is minimal, 52 is excellent. If you’re not in that range, you’re in trouble.

I consider myself a fairly slow reader (see other comment) and nothing on this list took very long to read, other than LotR and The Count of Monte Cristo. One of my goals for 2025 was to replace parades of endless distractions (social media, hn, Reddit) with books. I found that if I only read even for just 5min during morning coffee, I was far, far more likely to open a book when waiting while my car got smogged, kid at dentist, school pickups, etc. Those little between moments are so easily stolen from us and monetized, and they add up to a frightful total.

100%.

One of the best pieces of advice I got was from my English lit teacher: always carry a book with you. You never know when you’ll have down time to read.

I think it's quite hard to talk about norms for reading quantity, because it varies so much between people. There are a lot of people (more than half the population) who read basically no books in a year, and a tiny slice who read a huge number: so your intuitive take on what's "normal" is going to depend a lot on whether your social circle happens to have voracious readers in it. I suppose you can statistically determine some point in between as the "norm" but I'm not sure that point would reflect many people's experience...

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