How many books will you read in a lifetime? If you’re a pretty dedicated reader, you may be able to get through one book a week, so roughly 50 books a year. Over 70 years of reading at that pace, you’d read around 3,500 books—counting comfort rereads like Harry Potter for the third time. I only know a few people who actually manage to read like that, so presumably, for most of us, the likely book reads we will manage is much less than that.

To put that number in context, your local bookstore has around 30,000 books. So if you were to use your entire life’s reading in that store, you’d still only be a bit over 1/10th of the way through. That’s a lot of books you didn’t even get a chance to start.

I won’t deny that 3,500 books is a lot of books, but whatever you do, there will be far more books that you just don’t have time to get to than those you do find time for. So, like for movies, I think it seems wise to be at least a little thoughtful about what books you choose to pick up, and what books you decide to go on to finish.

As the author James Joyce said: "Life is too short to read a bad book."

In the course of making this, I learned that in 2010 the Google Books team estimated there were around 130 million books to choose from.

3,500 Lifetime reads

How small changes in customer demand can produce considerable disruption upstream in the supply chain. For instance, a sudden surge in the buying of toilet paper may cause retailers to put in larger orders to make sure they can keep up with demand. Manufacturers, in turn, may put in even larger orders for raw materials to make sure they don’t get caught out. In the meantime, customers had bought all the toilet paper they ever needed and demand suddenly dropped causing retailers to cancel all their orders, manufacturers to halt production and suppliers to be left with big stockpiles of unwanted raw materials.

I learned about the bullwhip effect from Tomas Tunguz where he considers economic effects of the coronavirus. He explains it with a brewery example in his article on proxy metrics for startups.

The Bullwhip Effect

A favourite of our kids is to play opposites day. It usually starts with something simple like where we say “No, they can’t have chocolate for breakfast,” and they then announce that it’s opposites day so that means they can have chocolate for breakfast. Then I say, but if it’s opposites day then that means you just said it’s not opposites day. Then they say, if it’s not opposites day then what they said is true so it is opposites day. After a while we end up being late for school.

This is a version of the liar paradox, also known as the Epimenides paradox after a chap from Crete who is supposed to have announced that all Cretans are liars. There are a bunch of versions of the paradox including the simpler one: this sentence is a lie.

Some other paradoxes: Jevon’s paradox, the coastline paradox, the Abilene paradox.

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The liar paradox