renaissance poisson

somebody posted about having read >75 books this year, and the *poing* generally tries to shoot for 100. i used to be right in that range, 90-110 a year. it's been dropping (fucking depression), but a couple of years ago it was still over 50.

this is the first year in my active memory that i've not read at the very least 50 books. that realization felt weird. depressing. i was headed down slump road, when i had to hit myself over the head. hard.

because i have read so much manga that i don't even know how much manga i've read. and since most of it is in electronic format, i can't just count shelf space (though that's been growing quite nicely as well), or go back to my log (since i started it, but didn't keep it up). the reading of it also feels different, and i don't have kinesthetic memory of picking up books, looking at covers, and turning pages to help the subconscious keep track.

statistics to the rescue. having a well-organized filesystem helps. i counted the files, or rather, let unix count them (find . -type f | grep -v DS_Store | wc -l): 25160. most of those are individual chapters, the average chapter has about 31 pages. that's 780,208 pages, which, at roughly 200 pages a manga comes to ~3900 volumes (*eyes bug out*). now, i have not read them all; there are a fair number of raws (~1500 found with another grep) and while i've paged through most of those, "read" isn't the word i'd use for that. but i _have_ read almost all of the remaining ~2300. ergo it appears that i have read about 6 entire manga every day, for the last 11 months (the obsession started with hikaru no go and it is all bookshop's fault).

OMG. that is insane. no wonder i am a wandering BL encyclopedia. and completely no surprise now that i've hardly read any regular books during this past year. i mean, i knew i was reading a lot of manga, but ...