Missing Almost Everything

"Consider books alone. Let's say you read two a week, and sometimes you take on a long one that takes you a whole week. That's quite a brisk pace for the average person. That lets you finish, let's say, 100 books a year. If we assume you start now, and you're 15, and you are willing to continue at this pace until you're 80. That's 6,500 books, which really sounds like a lot."

At NPR.

Then when you add music, movies, etc. All the time not spent doing what we love... It's a thinky piece about how things have to be chosen, how we choose them, how and why things fade -- because of new things, because of all the access we supposedly have to everything, via the internet, Netflix, etc.

It's worth following the link to Ebert's article, or follow it here. Which illustrates for me that things fade also because times and people change. Nobody wants to read all the old books, see all the old movies. I don't have that much interest in all of what Ebert mentions. I do appreciate more than just Howl in Allen Ginsberg's work, and I read Flaubert, Murdoch, Borges, Nabokov, Stendhal. Ebert says his goal is "to enjoy reading." I think that's the point. If you enjoy focusing your reading on a theme, becoming an expert, or if you read what you like, whether you read widely or narrowly, you have to trust yourself and just go. Otherwise, you risk spending too much time thinking about it when you could be reading, going to concerts, movies, etc.