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by defrost13 hours ago |

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by raddan9 hours ago|

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163 novels in 6 months!!! How is that even possible? This sounds like a good formula for producing noisy reviews.

by rsynnott6 hours ago|

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She's 71, so I assume she's pretty much retired, and can dedicate a lot of time to this (you'd really have to be willing and able to do so to sign up for this). That's about one a day. It seems... doable, though it's obviously a lot.

by lproven5 hours ago|

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27 a month?

So, a little less than one a day? That seems eminently doable -- I read more than that in my teens, considerably more sometimes, for years at a time. (Of course I had no internet to distract me: my teens were from about 1977 to 1986.)

I have read the Lord of the Rings trilogy 5 times, Kim Stnaley Robinson's Mars trilogy 6 times, and the entire Frank Herbert _Dune_ series twice. In my early teens, if under time pressure, several times I read about half a dozen novels in an afternoon.

For a retired professional? Sure. I'd be surprised if she couldn't.

Around 1997-1998, I was freelance, not working a lot, and lived with a judge of the Arthur C Clarke award. I read pretty much all the new SF published in the UK both years. A couple of hundred books a year, while working.

by FranzFerdiNaN3 hours ago|

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Let’s take your six novels in an afternoon. Il be generous and give you the entire six hours for six novels. Even at a relatively low page count of 250 pages each novel it would mean you read more than 4 pages a minute, for six hours straight. And if any of those six novels had more pages (very likely given the books you name drop) you could easily need to double the number of pages read per minute.

So at best you skimmed six books in an afternoon, which IS a time-honoured tradition by school kids who have reports due.

by WWWWH1 hours ago|

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I think you seriously underestimate just how fast a properly fast reader can go. On an unrelated note, I remember a line (from Jo Walton I think) on seeing one of those tedious ads—most CEOs read six book a week. To which, “not surprising, they’ve terribly responsible jobs and not much time”

by defrost9 hours ago|

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If you listen her speak off the cuff about material she has read and respond in real time to random questions you would likely soon come to believe her to have significant powers of recall and comprehension .. in a few languages.

Might explain how she landed a role as Professor of classics at Cambridge, a fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge, and Royal Academy of Arts Professor of Ancient Literature.