Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Books!

Interesting post over at Reason today. The author is talking about his five year old daughter's homework:
She had to count all the doors, all the windows, and all the shoes in our house. But we didn't know what to do with the latest assignment: "Count the books in your house." The answer space allows only a two-digit number, so anyone with more than 99 books is out of luck. As we discovered, there are a few hundred books in my daughter's bedroom and several thousand in the house.
That got him to wondering how many books the average household has. He wasn't really able to find good data on it but he thought most would have more than 100. I'd estimate that I've got more than a thousand books here. Probably much more. The Hugo reading project alone will add about 40 new ones and I'm also buying up the Man Booker series for another 40.
Note that I don't mean any of this as bragging. I'm certain that all of the regular readers here have home libraries well over 100 books and if it's somehow smaller it's because of aggressive library use or something similar. We are part of a book culture.
I'm happy to add that Relia is firmly part of that culture herself. She loves to have us read to her. Even has favorite books that she wants to hear before bedtime. She'll be a reader. Man, I'm glad of that.

2 comments:

Kate said...

I can't even begin to count mine. They are my friends....

Alfred T. Mahan said...

My niece, at the tender (and highly impressionable >:]) age of six, has an extensive library of both classic and newer books (very girly, however), as well as getting $75 in gift cards to B&N and Borders combined.

She told me, very matter-of-factly, "Uncle Andrew, we're going to hafta go book shopping soon, because you can get books on sale there (B&N), right?"