Confirm that 70 years of reading one book per week would amount to 3,640 books read in a lifetime.

Question

Have you ever done the math? If you’re lucky enough to have 70 years of literate adulthood, and if you read one book every week, you’re still only going to get to 3,640 books. Then you die. If you consider that the Harvard University Library system’s collection is counted in the tens of millions, or that a new book of fiction is published every 30 minutes, 3,640 doesn’t seem like
so many. [R30]

Answer 1

There is actually 52 weeks and 1 day in each standard 365-day year. Every 4 years there is also an extra leap day. In other words, there are 365.25 days in the average year. Over 70 years there should be around 25567.5 days depending on which year you start counting. That's 3652.5 weeks roughly. 

 

So you will read just a few more books than you thought. While the Harvard Library's collection is counted in millions of books, many of those will be repetitive information (same material in different languages or different books or different editions or copies of the same book) which could cut down on the amount of info you need to get through. Not to mention that certain information will be out of date and useless to general reading such as past editions of certain reference books (law compendiums, bound news media, etc.). And then your interests may not extend to many of the areas that the collection covers. While 3652 books is still not a lot, if you do read that many quality books, you will still be quite well-read. 

Answer 2

There are 52 weeks in a year. So, 70(52) = 3640.