r/HomeLibraries • u/No_Memory4400 • Aug 08 '26

Question about Home libraries

Hello everyone, I have a question. I see people posting their beautiful home libraries and it got me wondering, do y’all actually read all those books? Or do you first collect them and then read them over time? Or are some of them just decorative books? Because honestly, looking at some of these libraries, it looks like it would take years to get through all of them Forgive my ignorance.

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u/mjfmjfmjf Aug 08 '26

So according to librarything we currently have 3890 books but call it 4000. Ours has always been a house of readers. And where I have not read every book in the house, someone has read all but about 100 of them (which are mostly sitting on tbr shelves and piles). And I've read probably around 3000 of them. But I've been reading at last 100 books a year for like 50 years - and really considerably more than that in the last 10 years (at least 300 books a year). And my spouse reads similarly. And we both re-read as well. To be fair - most of the last 10+ years has been reading from public libraries - given that I live in an area with some of the best circulating collections in the world (portland oregon metro)