What's your number?

I have always been a giant bookworm. It runs in my family, at least among the females- my Grandmother, my Mum and my late sister are (were) all voracious readers. Whenever someone actually watches me read they get a little awed and slightly creeped out, or they accuse me of pretending to read because the women in my family are also very fast readers. We didn't take any speed reading courses or consciously try to read quickly. It's just how we read. I'm not sure if we're quick because we read so much, or maybe we read so much because we're quick. I knew I read faster than the average Joe, but nonetheless I was shocked and a little horrified to learn that the average person only reads about ten books per year...that's right...ten! That's less than one book a month!

This prompted me to start keeping a book journal, to determine how many books I read in a year. I created a spreadsheet on good old google docs to keep track. I'm not very good at updating it, and I'm sure I miss some, but I thought it would be interesting to at least get a pretty good estimate. I started the book journal on December 19th, 2009. Since then, I have read about 154 books of assorted genres, sizes and styles. Rounding today's date up about a week, that would be about six months, which means I read about 26 books a month, and about 6 books a week. We'll see how the journal continues, and in the meantime, I'm happy to be pulling up the average (though we can do better than 10 a year....seriously!).

So....what's your number?