Obstacles to Reading

A year ago, I put a book in my car to replace scrolling on my phone. I am now on my third car-book, which seemed like a concerning amount of car-reading until I did the math.

The average book ranges from 50,000 to 100,000 words.¹ With a conservative reading speed estimate of 200 words per minute,² they each take 4-8 hours to read. Since a minute a day for 365 days is 6 hours, each minute a day spent reading finishes a book a year.

A minute a day is a book a year.
Five minutes a day is five books a year.
Two minutes of reading a car-book a day is two car-books a year.

Books really do not take that much time to read, and they are also cheaper than ever.

Any book written before 1931 no longer has a valid copyright in the United States, and there is almost certainly a free and legal ebook version of it online. At worst, those ebooks can be read on the phone. For $50, they can be read on a kindle, which is a great reading experience.

Time, and now money, are not obstacles to reading. With thousands of free audiobooks, literacy is not even an obstacle. If you can access the internet, you can enjoy books. It is a choice.

And it is an excellent choice. I rarely regret the time I spend reading. Part of that is due to the medium. A book is not addicting or endless like social media. It is not unedited and casual like podcasts. And unlike tv and movies, the cost of creation is cheap and the medium has been available for thousands of years. Writing books is even more accessible than reading them. We, as a species, have become excellent at it. And most of the best books ever written are still available to us.

Of course, for every excellent book there are thousands to avoid. If you do not have a good idea of where to start, here are some free books that I loved reading.

Adventure Books

• Tarzan of the Apes - Edgar Rice Burroughs
• The Return of Tarzan - Edgar Rice Burroughs
• The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
• Dracula - Bram Stoker
• The Man Who Was Thursday - G. K. Chesterton

Religious/Spiritual Books

• The Book of Mormon
• Orthodoxy - G. K. Chesterton
• A Confession - Leo Tolstoy
• Siddhartha - Hermann Hesse
• In His Steps - Charles M. Sheldon

Children's Books

• The Princess and the Goblin - George MacDonald
• The Princess and Curdie - George MacDonald
• Heidi - Johanna Spyri
• Just So Stories - Rudyard Kipling
• Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson

Fantastic Books I Don't Want to Categorize

• The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• The Innocence of Father Brown - G. K. Chesterton
• Sir Gibbie - George MacDonald
• Memoirs of My Services in the World War - George C. Marshall
• Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin