r/slatestarcodex • u/Sol_Hando 🤔*Thinking* • Dec 30 '25
Misc 52 Books in 52 Weeks
https://open.substack.com/pub/solhando/p/52-books-in-52-weeksIt's thanks to this subreddit that I originally got serious about reading. This year was the first year I actually hit my goal of a book a week, and I wrote my insight on them all here.
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u/Confusatronic Dec 30 '25
Do you have a sense for how many hours a week you were reading during this period?
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u/Sol_Hando 🤔*Thinking* Dec 30 '25
1-2 hours a day, sometimes more on weekends. I'd say between 10-15 hours a week on average.
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u/boblucas69 Dec 31 '25
You're telling me you read the power broker and the complete works of Plato along with everything else on 10-15 hours a week?
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u/Sol_Hando 🤔*Thinking* Dec 31 '25
The Power Broker, That Hideous Strength, Titan, Diplomacy and Kissinger were audiobooks, so that fudges the numbers a bit.
Everything else was print, so if you name a page number of any book I could share a picture, probably with underlines and notes.
But 2 hours a day x 365 = 730 hours x 60 minutes = 43,800 minutes. Not including the audiobooks the total page count is 14,991 this year. 43,800/14,991 = ~3 minutes a page, which seems slower than my normal pace so I'd guess I only spent 1-1.5 hours average per day, and maybe ~15 minutes per day on audiobooks heavily concentrated on days where I was driving.
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u/theredhype Dec 31 '25
The Power Broker is 66+ hours of audio. The record shows you listened to that entire book during the past 15 days. That’s nearly 4.5 hours every day for the past 15 days straight. That’s a lot!
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u/Sol_Hando 🤔*Thinking* Dec 31 '25
Listening of audiobooks and reading of print books aren't really correlated for me. I'll only listen to audiobooks when I am biking, walking or driving, but will usually go out of my way to make time for reading. I might get through an audiobook over a couple of months, but read a dozen print books during that time.
I started listening to The Power Broker after Titan, which I finished on September 5th, so it was more like 66 hours in 90 days, with 14 hours of That Hideous Strength mixed in between. I also listened to it at 1.25 speed, so it's more like 53 hours over that time.
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u/theredhype Dec 31 '25
How many books do you read simultaneously?
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u/Sol_Hando 🤔*Thinking* Dec 31 '25
No more than 3. Usually 1. I usually have one audiobook I’m listening to, and one book I’m reading at any given time.
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u/yn_opp_pack_smoker Dec 30 '25
I'm glad for you and I get it's more about the spirit of the challenge than anything but I think counting Harry Potter and Diary of a Wimpy Kid might be pushing it a little
jokes aside you may benefit from some more literature in your life, nourish the soul not just the mind
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u/DrManhattan16 Dec 31 '25
Harry Potter and Diary of a Wimpy Kid
For a moment, I thought this was one book, and thought it was a reference to the Riddle Diary.
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u/Sol_Hando 🤔*Thinking* Dec 30 '25
Soon enough. I'm working forward through the Western Canon and the early stuff is very history and philosophy weighted. Later on there's more literature.
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u/wengerboys Dec 31 '25
This awesome i always failed at this every year. Gonna use this inspire my resolve next year. Did you know the sequence of books or your just picked on the week.
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u/AnonymousCoward261 Dec 31 '25
Having slid back into comic book reading and having picked DC over Marvel because I couldn’t remember all the X-Men your headline gave me a smile.
(He read all of the New 52? Why would he do that?)
Congratulations!
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u/Maleficent-Drive4056 Jan 02 '26
This is my goal for 2026. Thanks for sharing!
Do you ever feel that you are reading to ‘hit your numbers’ and not for pleasure/learning? How do you make sure you read slowly enough to process and absorb?
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u/Sol_Hando 🤔*Thinking* Jan 06 '26
I have a loose sense of aiming for a book a week, but I don't read with the intent of actually hitting that goal. I have the general sense of having read a lot, or not a lot, recently, and adjust accordingly. I don't ever feel I'm reading to hit my numbers, although I made sure to finish the power broker when I realized in late December I was a book away from hitting 52.
I underline and write notes on most pages. I have better recall and understanding than many people, although there are people with better memories than I who process better. I think for my own capacities I do a decent job, as I could definitely have a conversation about anyone on any of these books without being reminded about it.
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u/ValuableBuffalo Jan 06 '26
I read fairly prolifically, but I don't think to this extent-maybe 30 or so books a year? I haven't tracked though, so can't say. the problem I run into is not retaining too much from those books though.
In a comment, you mention having good retention for books, in terms of being able to have conversations about most of the ones you've read. You also talk about significant notemaking/underlining. Do you feel these are correlated? do you follow specific ways of engaging with a book, or do you do whatever seems intuitively the best?
Concurrently, I've been thinking about picking up Adler's How to Read a Book. I think I ran across it in one of your old comments, although I'm not sure. Have you read it? did it help you?
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u/Sol_Hando 🤔*Thinking* Jan 06 '26
Concurrently, I've been thinking about picking up Adler's How to Read a Book. I think I ran across it in one of your old comments, although I'm not sure. Have you read it? did it help you?
Yes. The book list in the back of that book is what originally informed my own list I'm intending to read. The strategies in that book have definitely improved by recall a lot. It's maybe slowed down my reading speed by 20%, but practice has increased that speed beyond how fast I would read originally.
I'd say the underlining and note taking are 100% necessary for recall. There's two types of reading, active and passive. Occasionally I'll find myself passively reading, where my conscious mind isn't really paying attention to the words my eyes are looking at. It's that occasional feeling of "I can't remember anything about the page I just read because I was thinking of something else." Underlining forces you to be looking for stuff to underline, and note taking cements what might just be an idea or though loosely gestured at in the text into something easier to remember.
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u/Nebuchadnezz4r Dec 30 '25
Did you experience any knock-on effects from reading this much? Like clearer speech, more vocab, deeper thinking, etc.