First: I wanna clarify this. I know that loads of people read like 100 books a year, or read all the time. I know these people exist. I’m asking about people that are like… average. An average american who just… reads. Doesn’t track everything or sets goals of like 100, or never stops reading… Anyway, I’ve been searching this up, and i find answers like 15-50, even 100. I find this highly unlikely, especially for average US citizens. Half the people i know don’t even pick up 5 books a year, let alone 15! I just don’t believe these stats. I read somewhere that people read 8 a month on average? That can’t be right for an average person. That’s like 2 books a week… I know people do read this much, but still… For an average person? So be real… how many books do people actually read a year?
I’m Canadian. I probably average two books a week, mostly fiction, mostly spy/murder/mystery thrillers like the Reacher series, so basically literature popcorn. Fantasy and SF are OK but most have become too weird for me, but The Martian was a good read. It takes a lot for me to be drawn into a non-fiction book. Recent ones I’ve read are by David Grann (Killers of the Flower Moon, The Wager). I really liked the collections of essays by Stephen Jay Gould on evolution, read all of them, RIP. Darwin, Thoreau, Emerson have all had their place in the past but now I’m not as interested, probably because I’m retired and just want to read for entertainment, not enlightenment. I tried reading a few books about Donald Trump, but they are way too depressing for me. I read a lot of the classics like Dickens, Shakespeare, Camus, Hesse when I was younger and tried the Russians but couldn’t get into them. I started War and Peace at least three times, including one winter when I had no electricity, and just couldn’t do it.
I read War and Peace this year and didn’t like it either, but just because you didn’t dig a 1400 page book about aristocracy during the Napoleonic wars doesn’t mean you might not like other Russian lit! The Brothers Karamazov, for instance, or The Master and Margarita — both so different in style and content 🐈⬛👹
But I mean, if not, then literature popcorn is great too 🍿. I like mysteries too, I guess I just had an impulse to shout out the Master and Margarita haha
There can never be too many shoutouts to Master and Margarita!
I read Anna Karenina as my first foray into Russian literature, and let me tell you, Bulgakov kept me in the game as Tolstoy was taking me out.