how many books have you ACTUALLY read? #booktok

[answerinprogress]

If you find yourself buying a lot of books you never read, check out the related video 👀

[KlementynaZavala]

I don't think it truly matters how much of a book you truly absorb. The experience of reading and feeling those emotions and considering what is happening is what is valuable for me. That's why I rarely annotate books- I don't care how deeply I'm understanding every word, I always feel like I get something from a book no matter what.

[josiahbaumgartner]

Read is past tense so I have still read books that I don’t remember anymore

[danielkidder]

Saying you haven’t read a book because you can’t remember it is like saying I didn’t eat lunch because I can’t remember it.
The act occurred, whether you recollect it or not.

[thoopsy]

People who don't think audiobooks count are meanies. I don't even read audiobooks, but they're an accessibility feature. If you read the transcript of a podcast, that would still count as consuming the podcast. Doing things in the way that's the least hard for you doesn't take away anything.

[Spikeupine]

Just because I've forgotten how to play a song on guitar doesn't mean I've not played it, just like having read a books I now don't remember the details of doesn't mean I've not read it. And all the things I once knew has still shaped the way I became, even though the knowledge is now lost

[finkelmana]

I would say "books read" are reading a book cover to cover. Understanding a book and retaining the information is completely separate. That being said, there are plenty of books I have NEVER read, yet know the contents quite well...

[iicydiamonds]

Even if I can't tell you the synopsis, yes, I still read the book. Because it probably still impacted me in some way, affected my thinking on a subject (yes, even fiction can do that), or was just a pleasant way to pass the time. I went to the park on that Sunday afternoon 3 years ago, even though I can't tell you who else was there or what I did. So yes, I did read the book. Hundreds of them.

[Eunseo]

Reading the book itself actually helps with your reading ability whether you remember its contents or not, so the number of books you read will still impact you.

[alexreid]

I would consider it any book I’ve read cover to cover or any audiobook I’ve heard in its entirety. Some of them I remember much better than others, but I don’t find that the format changes that for me. Even for books I don’t remember well, I still remember something about it that puts it in a different category from books I’ve never read.

[paintedcrow]

I think if you've read or otherwise taken in 80% of a book, you can say you've read it. Not being able to consciously remember everything years later is totally fine and doesn't affect this. Books get filtered through a whole lot of conscious and unconscious lenses that are different every time we read them, and the stuff we take away from them can stick with us subtly long after we remember where we learned it. It all kind of goes into a melting pot of how you see the world.

[searchfire]

Dyslexia made it truly impossible to get through a college reading list in a normal amount of time. Audiobooks are like any other form of consuming information- of course sometimes I lose focus or miss things, but I absolutely consumed the information.

[ruesparks]

The “if you don’t remember the concepts you didn’t read it” is a slippery slope. There are way too many factors involved here.
1) When it was read. Especially when we consider how chronic illness and aging deteriorates memory, it’s entirely possible someone understood on initial read but forgot as time passes. That may not even take terribly long to happen. Yet they may still remember their judgement and vibe of the book if not its details.
2) How deeply does someone have to understand the concepts to get a pass as having “read” it? And we also have to consider that for many books it’s only after a re read that people get deeper meanings from breadcrumbs they didn’t know to look for in first read through.
3) There is some fiction that doesn’t have a vast wider concept. Feel good fiction has a place, it meets an emotional purpose. It evokes a specific feeling or comfort. There may not be any overarching concepts, but that’s not its purpose.
4) Then there’s the elephant in the room. Every single reader gets something different out of the same book. Every time we read we bring our pasts, our ethics, our biases, and our issues into the reading. This is the whole point of the Rorschach test. Give two people the same input and you get vastly different results.
I think dissecting reading and book buying habits is great, and I loved the original deep dive. I think when we get to the point of what classifies having “read” something we but into issues of elitism and ableism, two things that have been deterrents of reading since publishing began.
I think the area where absorption becomes relevant is not really about whether someone has “read” a book, but what was their purpose is in reading. I see readers on BookTok try to speed read books not because it’s their natural pace, but because they feel like they’re being left behind by other readers. The deeper factor there is not comprehension, but the pressure they feel to perform/be productive to an extent outside their natural tendencies. That can result in not absorbing books, but the problem I see isn’t in the lack of absorption but the peer pressure that causes it.

[StarCrossed.Reader]

I personally feel that the message it is trying to convey is the most important thing. As long as the book’s purpose is fulfilled it doesn’t really matter in which way it happened (physically copy, audiobook, read to you, script version, etc.) the only thing that matters is if it is a good or bad book. If you can understand the content and you went through the same experience as everyone else then it’s reading. If you read a novel and you enjoyed it, it’s a good book. If it’s a non-fiction and you learned something new, then it’s a good book. That is all that matters as far as I’m concerned. Saying someone else didn’t read a book because it was an audiobook is like saying someone didn’t read a book because it was in Greek not English or that they didn’t read it because their copy was in “times new Roman” font and your copy was “times new Roman” font but in bold. It’s ridiculous. An audiobook is a book, just like an e-book and a physical copy. 😊
Edit: sorry it’s so long

[lemonboiyoutube]

even if you don't internalise the contents, and forget fully, you are still impacted by it and you still remember some of the contents. it's a purely semantics difference. if you say "i read this book a long time ago" that's good enough to communicate what you mean.

[MommaBeeb]

I have several favorite books that I’ve largely forgotten much of their actual contents. However, I still read it and have fond memories of doing so, since they are favorites. Memory is not infallible, and I’m not going to say I didn’t do something if I didn’t retain every single second in my memory.

[joe_the_zombie]

Probably literal hundreds, if not a thousand, books were my childhood

Although I know the contents of what's inside for probably only a hundred or two

[nocturnalizzie]

According to my Storygraph, I've read 69 (nice) books so far this year and about a third of them were audiobooks. I love to read physical copies of books and digital ones on my Kindle or phone but audiobooks let me do other things as I'm reading, which is awesome.

[ktwo.photography]

I think "how many books have you read" is more about how frequently you try to read, and less about if you remember the content. If you read a thousand books you're bound to forget many of them, but it shows that you're willing to pick up a new book pretty often.

[aaronk]

I believe there's more that goes into consciousness and intelligence than active recall. Most people don't remember their early childhood years. But it doesn't make them any less real, or any less defining of a time. You can read a book, absorb it, be shaped by it...and then no longer be able to actively recall it's contents.