alt Hacker Newsthe single takeaway from this book ad of a post: the CEO of Stripe claims to have read 10 novels/yr. Which is either a boast of how much free time he has or how he skimmed through some major novels. Third option: a lie.
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That's one every five weeks. Middlemarch is roughly 900 pages. Assuming one reads five evenings a week, that's 36 pages per sitting. Each page is roughly 300 words. An average reading speed is about 250 words per minute; let's knock that down to 200 for denser works like those discussed. That's 54 minutes of reading per day.
Hardly a huge time commitment, especially as a way to decompress from the day.
Even if we assume a 12 hour average workday for a CEO (I wouldn't, but let's be generous) and 8 hours for sleep, that gives him 4 hours of time to do whatever he wants with. If his main hobby is reading, 10 novels a year would be easy in that time.
Also, everybody knows CEOs have a lot of free time. They don't have real jobs.
The claim is not that far off from someone claiming they watch a movie a week. A book probably doesn't take much more than 10 hours to read on average. 50 movies are about 100 hours. Is one movie a week a mind-boggling amount of free time?
Are we really in an age where reading 10 novels a year is considered unbelievable?
If one reads a page a minute, which is a pretty decent rule of thumb, then a 600 page novel takes you ten hours, and reading ten of those takes you 100 hours. That’s reading for roughly 20 minutes a night over a year, taking some days off. Not the most common hobby nowadays, but hardly inconceivable for a busy person.
My notes say I read ~30 books last year (not counting kids books =P). I don't feel like I spend that much time reading, I just ran out of good stuff on netflix. And the kids require less attention than they did.
I did 30 novels a year in highschool, it's nothing crazy. Though tbf kids do have more free time than working adults, I think it would really only drop if you become parents though.
I used to read a novel per week, and I had other things to do. I stopped this rhythm mostly because I don't see many new novels worthy the time, but it is a doable thing.
Ten novels a year seems light if you’re an avid reader - I’ve certainly run circles round that record in the past, though I’ve admittedly fallen out of practice lately.
This is a ludicrous take. I was on vacation last week and read three books, albeit not weighty novels. I can't remember when I read as few as 10 novels per year. I'm not a CEO, but reading is also far from my only hobby.