In one of those events where it becomes obvious that my mind works a bit strangely, I was cleaning my room today, and I was like "I wonder how many books I own?" Turns out it's about 500, counting everything from my multi-thousand page history of the world to play manuscripts. As a conservative estimate, you can further figure that I've read somewhere between 3 and 5 times that number of books I don't own, be they borrowed, loaned from the library, or things I used to own. So I've probably read something between 1500 and 3000 books of all types over the course of the, oh, 20 or so years that I've been able to comprehend the written word. Of that number, probably about half are something other than novels, ie, something I've read to educate myself about something.
Further consider that, while I possess a bachelor's degree in history, and am apparently considered to be one of the Smart People, there's a whole hell of a lot, even in my own field, that I don't know. There are plenty of people who are way smarter, way better read, and own way more books than I do/am.
And it is, well, not that long ago in the grand scheme of things that owning a few books was a sign of wealth, owning a hundred meant you were exceedingly wealthy, and owning as many as I do was the province of a small minority. It's also not that long ago that a very few people could claim to know pretty much everything everybody knew about everything. Not so much, these days.
Do I have a point? Not really. Just something to think about.
Printing Press for teh win.
Posted by Dwip at August 16, 2005 2:48 PM