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Comment by officemonkey | Hacker News Reader

It's a skill. But unlike riding a bike, if you don't use it, you lose it. On the other hand, if you practice, it gets better.

I started keeping track of my reading in 2011. Here's my history:

    2011: 11 books     
    2012: 16 books     
    2013: 29 books     
    2014: 54 books     
    2015: 26 books (to date)

I did this while not significantly changing my lifestyle. How?

    1. I read to and from work. 45 min each way.   
    2. I read at lunch. 1 hr.  
    3. I chose reading instead of watching TV or playing video games.   
    4. I use eReaders, so I have dozens of books to read next.  
    5. I log my reading (obsessively?) on goodreads.com.

One thing I didn't do: I don't even try to read before bed. If I'm lucky, I get three pages read and then I'm nodding off.

"Why can't we read anymore?" I dunno. Maybe because _you_ aren't reading anymore.

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Logging what you read is, oddly enough, a new idea for me. One I'll have to seriously consider doing. In 2003 I started college, and an exercise in a class I had we had to tell two truths and one falsehood and let the class guess the falsehood. I don't remember what the falsehood was or the other truth, but the truth one that everybody thought was the falsehood was that I had read over 2000 books.

I only know that I read that many because I owned that many books (and didn't own every book I ever read). I was 26 then, and reading since 5-6, so that's really only 10 books a year. The real number of books at that point might have been more like 3000 - but I did re-read a lot of the books I owned so maybe not.

Since this time last year, I've probably read 30+ books. Gotta love the Kindle and Kindle Unlimited.

10 books/yr x 20 years = 200, not 2,000.

Setting up a goodreads account is simplicity itself. And since it's owned by Amazon, you can import all your books with a click. There's also a bookmarklet that "Adds book to Goodreads" from the Amazon page.

Once you get used to logging progress and marking completed books, you will really see the pages and books mount up.

Oops, you are right. I'd say I hadn't had my coffee yet when I wrote that, but even that's not a good excuse. How embarassing. 100 books does seem right though, I thought the 10 seemed a little too light.

I set up an account yesterday and did like that Amazon import feature. I wish It imported all the books you read with Kindle Unlimited though. Thanks for the heads up with the bookmarklet, I'll check it out.

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