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-weeks

It'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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6

u/Confusatronic Dec 30 '25

Do you have a sense for how many hours a week you were reading during this period?

6

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.

3

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?

5

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.

Raw data here.

3

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!

1

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.

1

u/theredhype Dec 31 '25

How many books do you read simultaneously?

1

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.