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Comment by interstitial | Hacker News Reader

I've read most of them, close to 90% -- and I still suck at life. Your mileage will vary.

Not knowing you, I can only suggest questions to ask your self.

What yardstick are you using to determine your level of suckage? Is it true? How do you know? If it is true, do you care? If you care, in what way do you care? Does it matter? If it matters, is it important? How so? Hopefully, the books you have read will help with the answers. You may not be able to answer all of these questions (and honestly, the answers don't matter too much), but they might serve to orient you.

I have read a fair number of the books on the list (and many more not on the list) and can truly say that I am a better human being for doing so, according to my criteria.

It says Alan Kay has a library of 5000 books. Do you have 5000 books?

You don't have to own a book to have read it - library, friend lending you book, and so on are all great way to get and share information. We often forget that in our current digital age, swapping as always been easy since Guttenberg.

Actually my library is closer to 10,000.

How do you maintain such a library? Do you devote a portion of your house? I always thought I had a pretty sizable library, but its probably <1000 books (and probably <500). As of now, its basically one book shelf with 5 rows, 2 of which are filled with paperbacks and two books deep (the other rows are larger books, including textbooks and only a single book deep) and another drawer filled with things that are in my reading queue, maybe 50 books total. I'm still rather young (I just graduated undergrad in December), but I can't imagine having a library of 10,000 books without a sizable portion of my life revolving around maintaining such a monstrosity. It must have cost you a small fortune to acquire 10,000 books and a room to house all of them in anything but cardboard boxes.

I just got home and I'm looking at this book shelf now and there's probably less than 150 books here. I'm just incredulous that you can have a 10,000 book library without being incredibly eccentric and wealthy, or maybe a well off professor or book fanatic. 10,000 books must take at least 1000 sq ft to store (assuming you arrange in such a way that these books are accessible, not just piled 8 feet high in storage boxes) -- realistically probably double or triple that if you wanted a place to sit down and do all of this reading, unless you have extremely high ceilings and a rolling ladder.

I just did some quick googling, and your assertion is the equivalent of owning 1/5 of a smaller sized Barnes & Noble, the smallest of which are around 3000 sq feet, or a fairly large detached 3 story home with maybe 4-5 bedrooms in a suburban area. Yes, Barnes and Noble doesn't organize it efficiently for storage, but for display, my point still stands that 10,000 books in a personal library is extreme.

0.9 * 5000 != 5000

0.9 ~ 1

Read some literature.

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