Speedy Reading?

More about Trains and Books
Pondering yesterday’s blog, I realized I have a lot to be grateful for because of my train travelling. It seems that I have spent around 900 hours reading novels on regular journeys between London (work) and Manchester (where I live). I read a novel at around 950 words per minute. That’s pretty fast. I’m a fast reader, partly because I’ve learned the skill of speed reading and partly because I’ve always read a lot – and it’s true that practice does make perfect.

(Quick aside: Contrary to what you might think, speed reading increases both reading comprehension and reading pleasure. It’s slow readers who tend to have a problem with reading – they’re the ones who rarely get beyond the first chapter of a book because their slow reading means they get very, very bored. I get very twitchy without a book or two to hand – am I addicted, I wonder? If I am it’s a great addiction, and not that expensive.)

Back to the Numbers
I was poor at numbers at school so please write in and correct me if I get these wrong, which is more or less a certainty. How many words are in the average novel? Here’s a matter of fascinating discussion – apparently Pride and Prejudice has 122,685 words. Most seem to reckon on 100,000 words as a rule of thumb. So let’s take that and calculate how many novels I’ll have read over 25 years of travel between work and home.

That’s 950 wpm x 60 minutes = 57,000 words per hour x 450 hours = 513,000,00 divided by 100,000 = 513 books.

Wow. That’s a lot of reading. And a lot of fantastic knowledge gained too. No wonder I’m addicted. So now I have to say a big thank you to the train companies for it’s because of them that I’ve learned so much. Hurrah for rail travel. (This is not something I ever thought I’d write.)

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