This is a ludicrous take. I was on vacation last week and read three books, albeit not weighty novels. I can't remember when I read as few as 10 novels per year. I'm not a CEO, but reading is also far from my only hobby.

To be clear first: The parent is being a little unreasonable.

However.

There's no need to resort to insults, nor to use a single person as an example, which doesn't make sense, regardless of whether it's their "only hobby".

Average novel reading speed is an impossible metric. E.g. WPM measurements are irrelevant to long-form reading, are irrelevant to literary reading, and don't account for processing, tangential thought, or re-reading, which are of course highly variable. And "reading time" (the subset of free time conducive to literary reading) is also basically impossible to quantify broadly. It's also difficult to categorize people by how much they are trying to read. Some people are only a little interested, some not at all. Further, this is one of those fields where the super-humans aren't actually that rare, so you get a situation where the average person reads 8 books per year despite half of all people reading half a book per year (made up numbers).

Point of all that being, "novels a year" is one of the most culturally acceptable brags, because there is no "expected" value for people broadly. It's a hidden value, so we can say things like "yeah, I read 12 books a year, not a lot I know", and people generally won't roll their eyes at risk of appearing stupid.

Look at how many people on otherwise-rational HN are saying "I used to read 30 novels a year," "I used to read a novel a week," as if that means it must be easy to accomplish in Western work and life culture. We're drunk on the ease of implicitly painting people who can't read as much as us as simply dumb modern westerners.

I think it's an easy thing to do, and we shouldn't. It's not classy.

> We're drunk on the ease of implicitly painting people who can't read as much as us as simply dumb modern westerners.

I'm not sure we're doing that. That's certainly not my intention. I know and respect many people who read zero books per year.

I think what we're doing is showing surprise that reading ten books per year is seen as a flex or is worth lying about very publicly, and demonstrating (albeit unscientifically) that it's not that unusual.

That's one every five weeks. Middlemarch is roughly 900 pages. Assuming one reads five evenings a week, that's 36 pages per sitting. Each page is roughly 300 words. An average reading speed is about 250 words per minute; let's knock that down to 200 for denser works like those discussed. That's 54 minutes of reading per day.

Hardly a huge time commitment, especially as a way to decompress from the day.

Even if we assume a 12 hour average workday for a CEO (I wouldn't, but let's be generous) and 8 hours for sleep, that gives him 4 hours of time to do whatever he wants with. If his main hobby is reading, 10 novels a year would be easy in that time.

Also, everybody knows CEOs have a lot of free time. They don't have real jobs.

The claim is not that far off from someone claiming they watch a movie a week. A book probably doesn't take much more than 10 hours to read on average. 50 movies are about 100 hours. Is one movie a week a mind-boggling amount of free time?

Are we really in an age where reading 10 novels a year is considered unbelievable?

I don't not believe it, but some may. I suspect the average person doesn't read. (I'm even thinking just of British people, if you think that claim globally is easy due to whole countries with lower literacy/readership.)

Probably yes - according to some estimates the average person may only read one, or less.

That's by choice, not by impossibility. How many hours per year do they spend scrolling through social media?

(I ask ironically on social media. But in my defense, I'm currently reading two novels.)

If one reads a page a minute, which is a pretty decent rule of thumb, then a 600 page novel takes you ten hours, and reading ten of those takes you 100 hours. That’s reading for roughly 20 minutes a night over a year, taking some days off. Not the most common hobby nowadays, but hardly inconceivable for a busy person.

My notes say I read ~30 books last year (not counting kids books =P). I don't feel like I spend that much time reading, I just ran out of good stuff on netflix. And the kids require less attention than they did.

I did 30 novels a year in highschool, it's nothing crazy. Though tbf kids do have more free time than working adults, I think it would really only drop if you become parents though.

I used to read a novel per week, and I had other things to do. I stopped this rhythm mostly because I don't see many new novels worthy the time, but it is a doable thing.

Ten novels a year seems light if you’re an avid reader - I’ve certainly run circles round that record in the past, though I’ve admittedly fallen out of practice lately.