Let’s say you’re in the top fifth percentile of avid readers, tearing through a book a week on average. With such literary gusto raising your sails, you might feel like the entire world is an open book to browse at your leisure. But in actuality, you will hardly scratch the surface of available human art and knowledge. Think about it like this: if you read one book a week for 40 years, that puts you at a little over 2,000 books total. Well, that’s not too shabby, right? Now consider this data point: there have been nearly 1,000 episodes of the Law & Order franchise broadcast on television. And few people have time to read a book a week. If you’re lucky, you might manage to read more books in your lifetime than there are episodes of Law & Order.
