[Katsunami]

In the last few days, I've been adding a lot of Public Domain works to my library. These are books of authors I already read some works from, which I intend to read works from, and authors I know are highly regarded but of whom I didn't yet read anything. One of the writers I added was Tolstoy, because War and Peace, and Anna Karenina are so highly regarded.

After doing a page count of "War and Peace", my brain practically exploded.

Some background...

I count my books with a setting of 2400 characters per page, which seems pretty close to the average number of characters of most of my real paperbacks.

The longest book I've read to date, according to Calibre's page count, is Stephen King's IT, counting 1.169 pages. Musashi and Taiko, which I acquired yesterday, are not far behind with 1.167 and 1.140 pages. Shogun, by the way, has 1.094 pages.

(If you count the Lord of the Rings books as one book, and include the appendices, all of which I've read, then this would be the longest book. The total of pages adds up to 1.499 in Calibre, but I have them as 3 books: Fellowship, Towers, King+Appendices. When doing a re-read, I normally don't re-read the appendices.)

The longest book in my library at this point is James Clavell's Noble House at 1.236 pages. (Not read it yet.)

Enter "War and Peace". It counts 1.548 pages in Calibre, almost 400 pages longer than the longest book I ever read.

This made me realise something.

Unless I get some serious extra time later in life, or some more very long vacations, I probably won't be able to read everything I'd like to read that I already know of, let alone read new stuff that comes out.

To be honest, that scares me a bit. Does anybody have the same feeling that there is, nowadays, just too much to read, and not enough time to read it?