How Many Books Have You Read In Your Life?

So how many books have you read in your life? This is a question I’ve seen posted on the site Ask.fm and this got me thinking…indeed I’m a bookworm, book lover, book enthusiast and book hoarder – I have close to 2000 books – mixed paperbacks and hardcover books in my home, not to mention the many ebooks I keep buying. *sigh* I’m such a lost cause!

So let’s see, if I just take 100 books read in a year (and trust me, some years I’ve read way more than that), considering that I started to read books regularly at the age of 9 – and now I’m 45, that makes on average 3600 books read. But really the actual number is closer to 4000 books, if not more. While I do have a few other hobbies (making artisan designer jewelry for example, is another hobby of mine), reading books has always been and will remain my main leisure activity – especially mystery novels and thrillers, followed by paranormal books (paranormal mysteries and romances).

I’m currently living in a country (Cyprus) where most people don’t like to read (unless you count reading the newspaper as actual reading). I’ve talked with a few friends over the years who literally gave me the same reply, more or less. They all said:

“I prefer to live/experience life rather than read about it”.

While this does sound logical, I don’t fully agree with it. Maybe because I’m coming from a country where people really read a lot of books, have a lot of books on their bookshelves (pretty much everyone in my country of origin has a huge bookshelf that spans across the entire wall, full of books) and I literally grew up with books, learning that reading is a good thing.

And I believe it is. It expands and enhances imagination and creativity and also I think it helps with a better grip on language and learning new words. It enriches the vocabulary and, let’s face it, it makes for a great conversation starter – just like watching the latest movie. Except with movies you don’t really expand your imagination, afterall everything gets served to you ‘on a platter’ so to speak right there screen by screen, while when reading books your mind makes up its own images about what it reads and deciphers.

It would be fun to see a movie with several people’s ideas of a book read – how the characters actually look in each person’s mind, how the descriptions translate into actual images that the mind puts together. I bet everyone’s movie based on the book would be totally different from that of another person.

So how many books have you read in your life, I wonder, and which was the first book you’ve read, do you still remember?

Mine was The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas. I’ve read it I think at least a dozen times, after which I’ve read all other books by this French author. Btw if you haven’t reads this book (and I highly recommend you do, and also get it for your kids to read), the Kindle version of the book is totally free.

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