I have books, but the majority of the books I read I don’t buy.
I have more in common with readers, but that doesn’t mean I like readers more or respect them more. Frankly, that means they have something in common with me, and that can’t be a good thing.
You have some really slutty friends! 
I did mention Anais Nin…
I love to read too, but I have found so much more pleasure in putting down the books and going outside to live life, not just read about it. The obsessive readers may feel sorry for the non-readers because they are “missing something”, but I feel sorry for the people who spend all their time reading about things instead of going out and doing them.
But in the long run, isn’t it just personal preference? Why the pity? Why the snobbery?
You are 25. Lets assume you started reading with some competence at seven. That’s 18 years of literacy. For 700 books, thats 39 books a year. Assuming that for about 10 of those years you were required to read 3 books a year for school, thats reading 36 books a year voluntarily, or three per month.
Three a month is nothing to someone who pops off a book a day. For someone who doesn’t read as fast (either due to lack of time or reading speed), but for whom reading is a hobby, its a little less than average, I suspect. I was once a voracious reader - I probably managed six a month, and now don’t manage three books a month, unless I’m on a vacation that lets me kick back with a stack of them.
You aren’t lost, but you obviously aren’t a bibliophile who needs to read the way a drug addict needs a hit.
As others have said, there is an element of “what you have read” as well. I can still sit down and read six books a month if its slim and predictible genre fiction - but I wouldn’t consider someone who has read 700 books where 650 of them were 150 page romanance novels well read. But if you’d read 200 books in your life, but had managed to get through 150 classics of literature, you’d be better read than I am, in my mind.
If you ask me, going outside to look at the sidewalk is overrated as a path to enlightenment.
As overrated as reading a book about sidewalk gazing.
I don’t believe my grandmother owns ANY books other than a few price guides for her favorite types of antiques. Oh, and Grey’s Anatomy and a few guides to medical terminology and pharmaceuticals, but she uses those for work.
She’s also extraordinarily bright and quite well read. It’s just that she goes to the library for her books. Her opinion is that there’s really no point in reading a book you’ve already read, and besides, if she really feels the need she can always go to the library. It’s an unnecessary expense in her opinion, and her apartment is just big enough for all her other stuff.
Her daughter, my mother, has a house FULL of books. Full. Books in floor to ceiling bookshelves taking up half of two large rooms. Books on shelves all around her bedroom. Boxes of books she just doesn’t have shelf space for. I’d guess a good 2000 books in her library, not least because she works at a bookstore.
I remember visiting her recently to get some of her yarn and knitting needles. She’d been cleaning out one of those rooms of books – a studio with shelves of fabric and other craft materials – and there was a file box on the floor overflowing with attractive, well-cared-for hardcovers.
“Some of these books,” she said, “I liked so much I bought them three or four times.”
Me, myself, and I. I have four bookcases – one tiny pine one with four short shelves, two generic three-shelf models (you know, the sort everyone has) and one nice tall cherrywood five-shelf. Total books, not including individual comic books but including roleplaying books (maybe ten) and comic compilations (maybe fifteen) I figure maybe 500 total.
I hate moving. Though that may be equally because of my small collection of antique oak furniture…
Everyone else hates it when I move, too.
No offence taken, It’s curious that the older I get the slower I do read. Not that this is any reduction in skill level (hey, I’m not that old yet) but more of a desire to understand the content and context of the story as well as the motivation of the author (pulp novels still go by pretty quickly, the author’s motivation in those is obvious from the start $$). That plus a lack of time to devote has really slowed me down, but most early King novels were about in the 6-9 hour range, the first Harry Potter was a lot shorter (3, maybe 4 hours) but the others were broken into shorter segments. Non-Fiction always takes a lot longer as I try to cross reference the work and take my time with each concept, often re-reading a chapter several times to make sure I fully understand before proceeding.
The path to enlightenment is not a road to a door, but a path that leads ever on into the horizon 
.
I can read a thousand books and each one will be different. But if I step outside my front door a thousand times, I’ll see the same sidewalk every time.
Basically, I’m restated what I said in my previous post in this thread. There is a very low limit to how much any person can know based on their own personal experience. So you have two choices; learn very little or learn from the experience of others.
Any form of communication can constitute “learning from the experience of others.” You have not demonstrated how books in particular are better than other forms in doing this.
Pity you’re not more observant.
Speedy reading, not speed reading. When I was a kid Evelyn Wood speed reading classes were very big, because JFK supposedly used the technique. They claimed that you read with comprehension. But a study showed that a person just taking the test without reading the passage got pretty much the same comprehension score as the speed reader. I haven’t seen an ad for a speed reading course in years, though I suppose they still exist.
I’m sure everyone will agree that, in theory, there must be a balance between personal and vicarious experience. These broad, absolute statements are nonsensical and counterproductive.
Role modeling is important also. My mother told me about how when she was a child growing up in the Depression a book was the most wonderful birthday present. It made me appreciate that I didn’t have to wait for a birthday to get one. She also impressed upon me what a wonderful place the library was. Somehow she figured out that I was ready for Jules Verne at the end of the first grade. I only recognized how amazing that bit of insight was after it was too late to ask her why and how she knew, though. I wasn’t a fast reader at all - I was mediocre until the middle of the first grade, when something clicked and I went from first grade reading level to tenth or twelfth grade in the space of a month or something.
If all non-readers spent their non-reading time meditating, hiking, enjoying nature, doing complex crafts, reading the SDMB, fine. But I suspect, given the average TV watching time in this country, most are staring at the tube.
You are missing my point.
What I was trying to say above, is that some people obviously spend so much time reading that they don’t get out and actually experience the things they only read about.
I can leave my house and experience 1000 different things. Your problem is, is that you aren’t looking beyond the sidewalk. I’ve taken my kids around the world and experienced things locally from hiking to camping to fishing to riding our bikes around the island. We hit the farmer’s market every few weeks, have a pass to the local amusement park, the planetarium, and visit the library on a regular basis. We’ve taken classes in photography, sign language, painting, gardening, cooking. We see exhibits, aquariums, planetariums, and concerts. A great deal of time is spent watching my son’s baseball and basketball games. I love spending time talking with friends and family, not with my nose in a book.
As I said, I love to read too, but I am not so obsessed that I hole myself up in my house and read 7 books per week and live through the experiences of others. I would much rather read 1 book every few weeks and spend my spare time experiencing life for myself. Who has time to sit down and read a book straight through for 6 to 12 hours when there is so much going on outside your front door, beyond the pages of a book? I don’t have time to read a stack of books and fit everything else into a 24 hour day. I choose to make the books a lesser priority in the competition for the time I have to do things I enjoy.
But that’s just me!!! YMMV. I know that other people don’t have the same interests as I do or are unable to leave their homes and do the things I like to do, and that’s okay! I am not putting down people who spend so much time reading, just those with the condenscending attitude and pity towards people who don’t share their obsession with books. The number of books you read does not make a person more rounded, well read, or more experienced. In some cases, I think it is quite the opposite.
Though a little mean, this makes some sence to me. Before I got my first propper camera I would always see the same things every day, unchanging except with the seasons and occasional odd happenings. After the camera I learnt to observe much more closely and see everything is different every day, in small but important ways.
I would also read 1 or 2 books a week, mostly fiction. Nowadays I read maybe 1 or 2 books a month, but they are philosophy, or technical books. I feel I get more out of my reading now than I ever used too.
Don’t assume that people who are reading a lot are devoting their entire lives to books. I read 1, 2 or sometimes 3 books a week but I only read at night in bed. The amount of time I spend reading depends on how long it takes me to get to sleep - some nights I read for 10 minutes, some nights for 4 hours. Reading a lot and having an active lifestyle are not mutually exclusive activities. That may not have been the point you were making, but it’s something that some people here seem to be thinking.
I fail to see how one can, for example, learn more about building a bookshelf by reading about building bookshelfs than by actually building a bookshelf. Granted, it helps to follow instructions, but sometimes a freestyle project works out better than someone else’s because of the individuality of the piece. It also helps to read a little about woodwork and power tools. But in the end, the actual experience that drives the knowlege home is in the doing, not in the reading about doing. Allowences are given for those who are truly unable to enjoy certain experiences on their own (As a man, I will never experience childbirth for example), but to say that there is a limit on knowlege that originates from personal experience lowers the value of experience. After all, do you truly believe authors write books based on stuff they have read or based on stuff they have done?
BTW, I would like to retract my earlier post about TV Guide, I just saw the new format, man that blows.