Wednesday, June 28, 2006

Fifteen minutes a day

I was recently talking to a friend about reading. How does one, in today's world, get to and through good books? It recalled to mind this section from When I Don't Desire God that points to the importance of building in time, even fifteen minutes:

Suppose you read slowly like I do - maybe about the same that you speak - 200 words a minute. If you read fifteen minutes a day for one year (say just before supper, or just before bed), you will read 5,475 minutes in the year. Multiply that by 200 words a minute, and you get 1,095,000 words that you would read in a year. Now an average serious book might have about 360 words per page. So you would have read 3,041 pages in one year. That's ten very substantial books. All in fifteen minutes a day. (John Piper, in When I Don't Desire God, p129)

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