"It would be a good thing to buy books if one could also buy the time to read them; but one usually confuses the purchase of books with the acquisition of their contents."

You know those handful of times in your life when you've read a sentence that is so profound that it hits you like a ton of bricks? You are left very literally gasping for air and dizzy with the words. For me this sentence from the essays of Arthur Schopenhauer is one of those moments.

What an absolutely incredible bit of psychology! My whole life I've been buying way more books then I could ever possibly read. In fact, one of the first tangible insights I had into my own mortality was when I was about 8 or so years old and I calculated how many books I could read in my lifetime at the rate I was reading them (which was prodigeous compared to the rate I have time for today). It was a sobering calculation and it bothered me deeply for many years. In fact, I can still make myself sad about it.

Why do I do it? Why do I continue to buy more books than I will ever have time to read? It's exactly as Schopenhaur says. It's because at the bookstore (or at the moment I'm about to one-click purchase at Amazon) I'm making the wrong calculation in my head. I'm thinking: "Sure, I'd gladly pay $24.95 to have the contents of that book in my head. What a deal!"

What I should be thinking is: "Are the contents of this book in my head worth $24.95 and 12 hours of my life?" I've never thought to ask myself a question like that when buying a book. I think I'd have more money in the bank, fewer unread books on the shelf and less guilt about them if I did.

It's important to know about how fast you read so you can do a quick estimate of how many hours the book will take you. And it's important to get a sense of how you want to be spending the hours in your life and how many hours you want to spend reading.