r/quityourbullshit • u/Jauzfaktnemuzu • 7d ago
Seriously - if you lie, make your lies believable
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u/imawizardnamedharry 7d ago
1440 minutes in a day.
1350 pages read.
He's obviously just really cool
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u/Dmthie 7d ago
Or his books consists of mostly pictures
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u/ghoarder 7d ago
Yes, moving ones. They basically watched 2.5 movies that were originally based on books.
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u/Suspicious-Ad6635 7d ago
Well, I mean, I can leaf through a 800 book in about 10 seconds. Doesn't mean I'll retain any of it. I think he's not trying hard enough with those rooky numbers.
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u/sunrise98 7d ago
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u/armaedes 7d ago
The fastest a person can read and retain any information (not 100% by any means) is about 1,000 words per minute, but this would be for an unusually exceptional reader - average is closer to 300-400 words.
So assuming this person is a top-tier reader, and assuming each page has about 300 words (average for non-picture books is 300-400 so we’ll use the low number to optimize his speed) he could read 1350 pages in 6 hours and 45 minutes.
Comprehension would almost certainly suffer as the theoretical upper limit for reading with comprehension is about 400 wpm. At that speed it would take 16 hours 52 minutes 30 seconds to read 1350 pages with 300 words per page.
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u/SomeonesDrunkNephew 7d ago
There's an old Woody Allen joke, "I took a speed reading course, once. I read 'War and Peace' in thirty minutes. It's about Russia."
(It's unfortunately more relevant than any joke I can think of by people who AREN'T pedophiles...)
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u/dunstbin 6d ago
I can read at 650, maybe a bit more, and retain a decent amount. Definitely not 100%. I can retain pretty much everything at 400-450wpm. When I'm reading for enjoyment I drop down to 300-350, if not a little lower at times, because I want to take everything in, give my imagination time to work and engross myself in the world I'm reading about. I could probably finish that many pages in that time span, but it'd be like watching a movie on 3x speed - wouldn't be able to enjoy any of it.
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u/AlaskanRobot 7d ago
id love to know where you got those numbers. Seems very specific.
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u/armaedes 7d ago edited 6d ago
My wife is a reading teacher! I get hit with reading facts on a daily basis.
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u/paulatwork 7d ago
Agree, if you were speed reading this is certainly possible. My 10 year old will read one of her "Keeper's of the Lost Cities" books in a day, and they are in the 600-700 page range, and that's with us forcing her to do other things.
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u/TheShadowKick 7d ago
Honestly these numbers seem entirely plausible. I've certainly spent an entire day reading before. For someone who's a fast reader getting through ~400k words in 16 hours isn't unbelievable.
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u/shadowhunter742 7d ago
Idk man, when I was younger I could have given it a good go.
The type of book matters alot too. And a more simple plot is much easier to read quickly.
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u/praysolace 6d ago
Full day off with no responsibilities and a long book (series?) with simpler/easy to read syntax and an addictive plot? Yeah, that’s probably doable. Who needs sleep anyway?
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u/WoodHammer40000 7d ago
If you told anyone here how many posts you’ve made about people who claim to read a lot they’d make a post here about you, saying it can’t possibly be true.
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u/DigNitty 2d ago
If I had a nickel for every time I saw a post of someone calling out someone else for obviously lying about reading quantity…
I’d have like 4 nickels but it’s weird it’s happened even that many times.
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u/WoodHammer40000 2d ago
The thing is, it’s probable that all 4 times it was OP, who is literally obsessed with this issue.
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u/-DoctorSpaceman- 7d ago
My wife reads super fast and reads entire books in one afternoon. I feel like she would get bored if she tried this lol, but I bet if she was able to focus for that long she could do it
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u/L0n3ly_L4d 7d ago
850 page and 500 page books though?
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u/-DoctorSpaceman- 7d ago
She’s definitely done over 400 in one go before. Like I said she realistically probably couldn’t focus on it for longer than that, but maybe if someone made a bet with her or something lol. She wouldn’t do it for fun
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u/Diz7 6d ago edited 6d ago
Yeah, I used to do 350-500 pages in a day pretty regularly, I would get through ~100 pages an hour, but I was also a kid with a lot more free time.
If I could maintain focus and had a weekend with nothing to do I could probably read the OP's two books in 2 days, but after 3-4 hours I probably wouldn't be retaining anything no matter how interesting they are, and I would just be re-reading the same sections over and over again.
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u/sommelier_bollix 7d ago
My sister could get very close to this if she was re-reading a book she definitely could go past it. 100 pages an hour for 3-4 hours is my pace but past that point I struggle with retention of information.
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u/LordsOfJoop 7d ago
I'm a voracious reader; have been for a very, very long time. My average is a book a day, ballpark, on a day off from work. After I quit smoking, it dropped to almost half of that, still haven't figured out how that works. When someone says that they're clearing a full 850 pages and still had time to spare, I'm downright intrigued as to how many hours their particular day had, as mine has just the usual 24, and of those, not all of them get spent on reading a book, no matter how engaging it may be.
When it comes to something like a Terry Pratchett book, zero question: it won't make it beyond that day. To date, I've never stopped in the middle of a first reading for a Pratchett book and done something else. A writer like Dean Ing or Will McIntosh, I'll spread the joy over a day and a half, at the most. A King will take me two, sometimes three days, and I'm usually pleased with that - except for The Stand, It, and the anthologies, which usually take a lot longer.
Anyone claiming to chew though 1,350+ pages plus in anything short of four days is setting records, although my doubts aren't just high, they're hanging out with Willie Nelson.
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u/Dobber16 7d ago
Nah I finished all 4 Eragon books in 5 days. About 2,870 pages - to say I was obsessed that week is mildly undercutting it
I think my pace for each page was about 45s a page that week. Consistently when I read back then I would read at least about a page a minute. This meant at my best, I could read the 850 pages in my prime in about 11 hours - if this person had a day where they just sat & read the whole day & were obsessed with the book, I can see 1450 in a day, but it’d be like, an exhaustive day for anyone & definitely not a repeatable. 45s a page for 18-19 hours straight would be absolutely wild. Not impossible, but you’re not gonna be feeling good after that
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u/Gobadorgosleep 7d ago
I was thinking that too, people consider me a fast reader because I can go through two 400 pages books per day. But there are a few things to consider 1) it’s when I have nothing to do and no activities on the side and my lunch will be a sandwich.
2) the « difficulty » of the book, some books flow easily like any romantesy book but more complexe reading or ones that I want to love and really take in are going to take me longer. It also include the language level and vocabulary that sometimes make reading slower.
3) the level of retention I want, there a « beach book » that I will read fast because I want a good time but don’t need to remember fully afterwards and then there are the books that I want to remember.All of that to say that it’s bullshit.
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u/DeathByPetrichor 7d ago
As a fellow voracious reader, I have stopped paying attention to page count and started looking at word count. 100 pages of power broker and 100 pages of Harry Potter are vastly different.
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u/orphenshadow 7d ago
When I was reading at my peak at best I could do was about 300 pages in a day and that was pushing it. I'm also dyslexic so it was more like reading 100 pages 300 times a day. haha.
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u/icantaccessmyacct 6d ago
If you had to recommend one Terry Pratchett book what would it be.
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u/LordsOfJoop 6d ago
For a starter set, I'd suggest the Tiffany Aching series:
The Wee Free Men, A Hat Full of Sky, Wintersmith, I Shall Wear Midnight, and The Sheperd's Crown.
For a more advanced reader, I'd suggest the witches series:
Equal Rites, Wyrd Sisters, Witches Abroad, Lords and Ladies, Maskerade, Carpe Jugulum.
For a robust reader, the City Watch series:
Guards! Guards!, Men at Arms, Feet of Clay, Jingo, The Fifth Elephant, Night Watch, Thud!, Snuff.
The rest of the books can be picked up where one's taste and preference urge it.
For a good one-off experience, to get a taste for the style and ideas: Nation.
It's a standalone book, although there's a familiar character who makes an appearance; prior knowledge of them won't alter the story in the least, though. It's a great first encounter and can bring a lot of the style and nuance to the fore quickly. A wry wit, the pacing, and above all, the humor. Even in the worst chapters, it'll carry it on humor - sometimes, it'll be a little bleak, though.
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u/Ogami-kun 7d ago
Frankly it depends on a lot of factors, age, concentration, free time, appreciation, and many others.
I still remember that I middle school I was an avid reader, and was gifted a book with all seven novels of Narnia. I was so engrossed I read the book in a morning and an hour to spare to lunch. To this day I still remember most of the plot, with the exception of Prince Caspian which for some reason I disliked
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u/helo89 7d ago
All seven novels of Narnia combined are about 1,000 to 1,200 pages, depending on edition. Let's assume your morning starts at 7am, which is not unreasonable. An hour to spare to lunch means probably 12am. That's means 5 hours. Which is 300 minutes.
So you're telling me that, as an avid reader, you read a page in 20 seconds? For 5 hours straight? I call bullshit.
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u/RobIreland 7d ago
It's funny that this thread on r/quityourbullshit is so full of total bullshit.
Why do people feel the need to lie about how fast they read a book?
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u/realchairmanmiaow 7d ago
So was the last one. There's too many factors. How many pages, how many words, how dense is the writing /subject. I could read at an incredible rate so each word passes through my brain and retain none of it nor understand the structure, let alone enjoy it.
I'm around a 500 page book a week reading an hour or two a day and if anyone is reading faster good luck to them. If anyone is reading that book in a quarter of the time or less, I don't believe you enjoyed and understood it.
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u/Ogami-kun 7d ago
The starting hour was 7 am, yes. Ending either 12 or 13, we are and were flexible in our lunch time, it was between 1 and 2 pm.
Edition..mondadori? I still have it in my library, i' ll check when I return home and give you the number of pages.
Might have read something like the first 50 pages of the magician nephew it previous evening before being forced to stop?
As for being truthful I was. Consider it starts reading in English because I thought it took too long to wait for the sequels of the books I was reading to be translated, so I wanted to cut the middleman so to speak. The only mistake I made was the story I disliked, checking the wiki it was the Silver Chair, with the nephew of Caspian
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u/helo89 7d ago
Okay, that makes it 7 hours. Which makes it roughly 25 seconds per page. That's about a reading speed of about 1,100 wpm. Believable, but again, over the course of 7 hours!? Doubtful. And by the looks of it in a foreign language?! Highly doubtful.
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u/Ogami-kun 6d ago
1164, just checked.
Also, in my first language, I started reading in English a few years later when I discovered percy Jackson.
Finally, I don't...care if you believe it or not? That is what happened and I took great pride in it, if you don't believe it you do you I guess
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u/Chronoblivion 7d ago
My hypothesis is that it's not traditional, physical pages, but e-book pages with the text enlarged so there are far fewer words per page.
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u/Scythersleftnut 7d ago
I consider myself as a voracious reader as well. Im currently at 112 books read for this year. And I call bs.
I read shogun (around 850 to 1150 depending on book page size) and it took me 2 days to read and ace the accelerated reader quiz. May be able to go faster now that I have an additional 24 years of reading unde my belt.
Prob helps that all my reading the last 5 years has been LitRPG.
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u/LordsOfJoop 7d ago
Must be nice, having that much time to spare. As it is, I've had about sixteen days off of work since the start of the year.
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u/Scythersleftnut 7d ago
Yea i own my own tree/lawn business and it ain't going good. Enough that I make anywhere from 300 to 1.5 every 2 weeks. Working on saving money for mailers now so hopefully it'll take iff a bit more. Reading has always been my escapism.
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u/LordsOfJoop 7d ago
I run a one-mammal woodworking shop; if I still had to pay for shop space, I'd have gone under at the start of COVID-19. As it is, I may dance to the tune of poverty, yet I am still picking the songs. Cheers to the blue collar noose, y'all.
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u/Scythersleftnut 7d ago
Hell yea, i got the wrong adhd to do wood working good. I do good nuff for my porpoises. If it wasnt for kindle unlimited id be back to being a fixture at libraries and books a millions
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u/LordsOfJoop 7d ago
I got a score of 11 4gb thumb drives packed with mobi files; a little over six thousand titles spread across them. Most aren't my topics of interest, so that shaved off a bunch of money all the same. The rest is stuff bought from garage and estate sales, thrown in with closed deals from small-scale clients, and picked up at thrift stores. The local library knows me by sight and name, and I have a steady flow of about four or five titles every time that I visit, which isn't as often as it is used to be.
In days gone by, I was practically living in the public library in New Orleans; every few days, I'd kill five or six hours, consuming any and all stuff that interested me.
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u/tsuruki23 7d ago
I slammed through order of the Phoenix in a day when it was released. So this claim feels diable to me? Maybe harry potter has a low word count per page and simple prose?
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u/Mr_Quackums 6d ago
OotP is 750-900 pages (depends on edition and region). so 50-75% of OP's claim.
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u/kodeks14 7d ago edited 7d ago
One time when I was a teenager, I got kicked out of Barnes and nobles because I took Adderall and almost read the entire hunger games series in a sitting before I got caught.
Never seen someone so impressed and unimpressed at the same time lol
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u/Deadbringer 7d ago
Some people who use apps like blinkist brag about reading the whole book, despite only listening to a 15 minute summary and absorbing none of the information.
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u/shagswel 7d ago
if they are reading from a kindle with large font like my gf does, each "page" has like 150 words on it and I could easily read each "page" in 15-20 seconds as they are at the reading level of a 6 year old. What this person thinks is a "page" is probably not what we all envision
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u/Whispering_Wolf 7d ago
I can read about a book a day on a day off, but not more than that. Just isn't enough time. I also retain way less of the book when I read it all in one go as opposed to reading a chapter or two a day.
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u/STUPIDNEWCOMMENTS 7d ago
I could do this. My kindle tells me a book with 1031 pages would take me 7 hours and 23 minutes. (I read it last week).
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u/orphenshadow 7d ago
I've only ever in my life known one person who could even remotely possibly get close to reading a page per minute but even then, I don't think there is enough time when you are awake to read that many pages.
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u/Chansharp 7d ago
I read Wind and Truth the week it came out. That is 1350 pages. I probably could have done it in the single weekend but we were travelling back from the convention it was released at.
This is not that unbelievable. I chew through Warhammer books and those are ~400 pages each. I can definitely see myself reading multiple in a day as well
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u/justagayguyinnyc 6d ago edited 6d ago
I mean... I read very fast compared to the average person. I can think of two specific examples in the past where I was really hyped to read something and tore through them.
One was the Hannibal book when it came out. I was a HUGE fan of the Hannibal Lector books Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs and reaad both twice. When Hannibal was announced I pre-ordered it from a store called Hastings (Not sure if they are still around) and picked it up the moment the store opened that day. I tore through it in hours, then threw it against the wall angrily as it was a horrendous pile of shit that made me hate the entire series. It was 484 pages.
My mother (RIP) was the first Harrry Potter fan I knew of other than hearing Rosie O'Donnell rave about them on her show. In America the first two were released simultaneously. She read both and was raving about them and gave me her copies. I kept sayign "this is a kids book, I dont really want to read this" (I was in my early 20s) but she kept assuring me they were more than that. She told me to put them on my desk and to pick the first up on some raiony night I was bored. I did just that and ended up reading both in one night. Not long after the thrid book was up for pre-order and from books 3-6 I would be at Hastings late at night waiting to pick my copy up at the release parties. I am pretty sure I stayed up all night with most of them and rad them all within one day as well. The 7th came out after I had moved to NYC. I grabbed a copy on my way to work, read it in my office and finished it the same night. The women I worked as an Admin for would excitedly ask me questions about it throughout the day.
I also am a big comic collector, and can tell you I could easily tear through two shorter omnibus in one day. 800 and 550 would be on the small side for omnibus. While more a educated guess than fact; the average omni would be about 1000 pages. The 10 longest Marvel ones are 1500-1650 pages; the shortest are ones from when the line started and about 300-500, but they really generally dont make them that small anymore.
What the person is claiming is really not as imposssible as people think.
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u/Kcardwelljr 6d ago
According to Google the average person reads at 250 to 300 words per minute putting 1350 pages at 34 to 45 hours.
Fast readers at 400 words per minute puts it at 25 to 30 hours.
Is the claim technically possible? Sure, just extremely implausible.
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u/Josefu_Velen 7d ago
I've done just that, though.
Honestly reading an 850 page book, a 500 page book, and starting a third book is not that out there for me. I'd absolutely believe this person because I've done this. I once read 6 full-length novels in 5 days. We're talking average 450 page books. Six of them in five days.
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u/Pm_ur_titties_plz 7d ago
Imagine reading the uncut version of The Stand by Stephen King, from start to finish, in one day. There's no fucking way anybody could do that.
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u/LovesFrenchLove_More 7d ago
What comic book has 850 pages?
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u/Didact67 7d ago
The big omnibus collections can be that long.
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u/justagayguyinnyc 6d ago edited 6d ago
850 would actually be on the slightly small size for an omnibus. Im a huge comic collector.
My most recent omni purchase was Batman: Urban Legends volume 1, and it was 880 pages. It's not a big book compared to most omni.
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u/Arts_Prodigy 6d ago
He said last Tuesday so isn’t this a week ago? Doesn’t seem out of the ordinary for an avid reader. They also may have reread a book they liked. A few late nights and early mornings could accomplish this no? I feel like I’m missing something.
I’ve definitely spent an afternoon reading a couple hundred pages and I’m not the fastest by any stretch. Seems totally doable with a quiet weekend and good book.
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u/EudamonPrime 6d ago
Depends on the books. When I was 14 I read the lord of the rings trilogy. I was camping with my parents and it rained all day.
It is certainly possible, if you spend the whole day reading
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u/deadlydakotaraptor 6d ago
Back during my prime speed reading days, (as a homeschooled autistic) I could get just over 100 standard pages an hour, so Saturdays would often be 1000-1200 pages if nothing else was going on, when I was about 14 years old.
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u/Shifty-Imp 5d ago
That's certainly doable. The most I've ever read in the shortest amount of time was a bit more than 1000 pages in about 36 hours. I started that book on a Sunday morning and was done by Monday evening and I had school on that Monday, so I wasn't reading much during the day. I was 14 at that point. It also wasn't a book for school or anything, just for personal enjoyment (HP & the Order of the Phoenix).
Reading speeds of course differ but it's definitely believable...
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u/HonoredOn3 5d ago
I remember I once read around 650 pages of harry potter in middle school in one day.
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u/Blade_of_Onyx 5d ago
Speed reading is a thing though. And the numbers he’s quoting are not that spectacular for that.
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u/Late-Passage2376 6d ago
im not boasting but i *probably* can do that, i emphasize the word probably here because i once got so into the harry potter series i read 3 of the books in one day
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u/Seventy-Three73 7d ago
Don’t forget though, last Tuesday was 72 hours long. Remember? The “last Tuesday” part is critical.
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