Date: Tue, 19 Mar 2002 00:41:46 -0500
From: Ted White <tedwhite at compusnet.com>
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: time travel
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>

"Keith F. Lynch" wrote:

> Ted White <tedwhite at compusnet.com> wrote:
> > No.  I've read hundreds of thousands of words -- probably millions
> > of words -- of SF since I read "All You Zombies" in 1959.
>
> More likely hundreds of millions, or perhaps billions, if you averaged
> anything close to one hour a day reading SF at typical reading speeds.

As a teenager I read an average of three books (or SF magazines) a day --
seven days a week.  I was voracious.  I have read at least 50% of the SF
published before 1950, close to 100% of the SF published 1950-1959, and a
Great Deal (but not nearly as high a percentage) since.  I got married (for
the first time) at the end of 1958, and that put a crimp in my completist SF
buying and reading.  But in the 1960s I got on the free lists of a number of
pb publishers (Ace and Ballantine among them), and I started reading slush
for F&SF in 1963.  (I read Lancer's backlog in 1966.)   I once figured out
that I averaged 600 manuscripts a month at F&SF, of which one or two (a
month) were actually purchased and published.  I did that for five years.
The next ten years I edited AMAZING and FANTASTIC -- for which I also read a
great deal of stuff.

Which may explain why I now read mostly mystery writers for pleasure.

> For comparison, this list has contained about two hundred thousand
> words since it started five weeks ago.

Non-fiction (mostly).  Hell, I read the Washington POST every day.  How many
thousand words is that?  (I usually skip the sports section.)

--Ted White