In this article I want to look at reading as it pertains to the writer. I saw something incredibly depressing – I think on Twitter – a few months ago. By averaging how long they take to read a book, then taking into account their current age, someone worked out how many books they could possibly read in the years they had left. The answer was comparatively few. In the hundreds, I think. The crushing truth is we do only have so much time on this wonderful planet, and there really only so many books we’ll get to read. Stephen King says in his seminal we should read four hours a day and write four hours a day. If we had the life of Stephen King – and he so deserves that life being, in my mind, the writer’s writer par excellence – then perhaps we would. But most of us haven’t. His emphasis on the importance of reading, however, holds true. So, with the limited time we have and the millions
