“Statistically speaking, you will die having missed almost everything.” – Linda Holmes
Linda Holmes wrote these words in 2011. For Linda this realization was tied to the vast number of books in existence in the world. By her very generous and back of the envelope accounting, a person such disposed could read two books or one really big book a week and accumulate 6,500 books by age 80. Even at that accelerated pace, an individual would be still only read a few books of certain genres and certainly miss the vast majority of the books ever written. The huge swaths of books written to date and the rate of new books published every year would make sure that, as she mentioned in the quote above, the reader would still effectively miss almost everything.