There are a number of locations on-line where one can maintain a record of what one reads...sites that have libraries of information about books and you can add a book if they don't have it listed, as I have done at one site. There one can also date a read and if you've been reading for a number of years, it is interesting to look back. Unfortunately, for some years, everything is a blank...while other years, the memory is as alive as yesterday. Last year I surprised myself by reading something like 180+ titles...the most of any year...and included in that 180+ are long reads like James Jones's, From Here to Eternity, that I read from 4-11 DEC, a solid week/828 pages...or The Woman Chaser, Charles Willeford, that I read in a day or less/192 pages...or Jonathan Franzen's, The Corrections, that I read 26-29 JAN, four days/610 pages.
This year I've read 92 (my goal is a hundred)...in 2010 I read 96...2011/125...but for some years, I can only remember reading 8 books for the year. Half the battle is knowing what to read...I wish I had access to the information I have access to now, back when I was lost in the library, pulling books at random from the shelf...few of them had snazzy dust-jackets...just a name and a title. I don't think it matters how fast you read, as I've also been rereading some of the titles I read way back when...Steinbeck's, East of Eden, his The Winter of Our Discontent...and heh! It's funny what one remembers from the first pass through...me, almost nothing...although in that last from Steinbeck, one of his characters writes the time on a block of wood (in his mind) and tosses it into the black water...the time he needs to get up and get going. I've been doing that ever since...and rereading it this past year was a hoot as I didn't recall reading that until I read it again in the story. Funny what the mind remembers.
“the thing about books is, there are quite a number you don't have to read.”
--Donald Barthelme, The King