Fifteen Minutes a Day = Great Reading
October 1st, 2008
On Monday I wrote a post encouraging us to read more books than blogs. Let these words by John Piper further inspire you to read:
“Don’t let long books daunt you, like John Calvin’s Institutes. To be sure, finishing a great book is not as important as growing by it. But finishing it is not as hard as you might think. Suppose you read slowly like I do - maybe about the same speed 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.”
“Or, to be specific, my copy of Calvin’s Institutes has 1,521 pages in two volumes, with an average of 400 words per page, which is 608,400 words. That means that even if you took a day off each week, you could read this great biblical vision of God and man in less than nine months (about thirty-three weeks) at fifteen minutes a day. The point is: The words and ways of God will abide in you more deeply and more powerfully if you give yourself to some serious reading of great books that are saturated with scripture.”
-Taken from When I Don’t Desire God
Categories: Books |
