He?s Joe Queenan, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal.? He started reading when he was 7 years old.? Fifty-five years later, he has read 6,128 books.? He ?hopes to get through another 2,137 books before he dies.?
He often ?reads dozens of books simultaneously.?? ?(He) starts a book in 1978 and finishes it 34 years later.??
He states that ?a case can be made that people who read a preposterous number of books are not playing with a full deck.? I prefer to think of us as dissatisfied customers.? If you have read 6,000 books in your lifetime, or even 600, it?s probably because at some level you find ?reality? a bit of a disappointment.?
He reads ?mostly fiction for at least two hours a day? and ?also spends two hours a day reading newspapers and magazines gathering material for his work.?? He ?reads books in all the obvious places ? in his house and office, on trains and buses and planes ? and also at plays, concerts and prizefights, and not just during the intermissions.? ?
He says that he?s ?never squandered an opportunity to read.? There are only 24 hours in the day, seven of which are sleeping, and in his view at least four of the remaining 17 must be devoted to reading. I once read ?Tortilla Flat? during a nine-hour Jerry Garcia guitar solo on ?Truckin?.?
He does ?not speed read books; its seems to defeat the whole purpose of the exercise, much like speed-eating a Porterhouse steak or applying the two-minute drill to sex.?
He ?almost never reads biographies or memoirs.?? He ?avoids inspirational and self-actualization books; if he wanted to read a self-improvement manual, he would try the bible.?? ?Unless paid, he would never read books by or about businessmen or politicians; these books are interchangeably cretinous and they all sound exactly the same: inspiring, sincere, flatulent, deadly.? Reviewing them is like reviewing brake fluid: They get the job done, but who cares??
This is a fascinating Wall Street Journal article titled My 6,128 Favorite Books which should be read in its entirety as I?ve only clipped a handful of nuggets.? The article was adapted from Queenan?s book titled ?One for the Books? which will be published this week.
If you are interested in reading another excerpt from this article, hit this link: My Philosophy is simple: Certain Things Are Perfect the way they are. Queenan gives his view on a physical book vs. Kindle.? Terrific?
Source: Wall Street Journal -? My 6,128 Favorite Books
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Source: http://davidkanigan.com/2012/10/21/hes-read-6128-books/
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