r/40k

Howdy! I felt like my reading/listening pace was too slow and it would take years for me to finish the Heresy books and I’d never catch up with everything I want to read that’s already out and new releases I’d want to read. So I did the math, figuring how long it would take to finish everything at my current pace. Turns out I was very right, but it’s not as bad as I thought! I also see comments here and there about how long it takes to finish the books and the guesses are all over the place. I’m pretty sure math isn’t a Heretical science so I felt safe doing this work.

A few disclaimers before diving in:

• I rounded to the closest hundred for all the large numbers, so my final numbers are gonna be slightly off. I also may have forgotten this at some parts so there will probably be slight inconsistencies.
• For book length, I used Audible for audiobooks and paperback for physical books. But when looking up titles it’s not always clear if page count is for paperback or hardcover and some books might only have hardcover. Also, ebook length is going to vary based on device settings and audiobook length will vary based on playback speed.
• I did this scribbled across several post-it notes over several days. This also means I used abbreviations and shorthand that made sense at the time but didn’t when I was going back over everything. It’s possible I got something backwards even though I went and checked everything again after. 
• The math gets funky later on and I had to ask my mom for help. She’s a retired math professor who now worries even more about my mental health hehehe.
• Don’t treat this as gospel, at best these are really good estimates and at worst this was just a waste of time.

The pace I’m going to use for everything is reading at 100 pages a day and listening at 2 hours a day. I figured that made the most sense, because average reading speed is about 50 pages an hour so that comes out to about 2 hours a day. Which might seem like a lot for some people, it was just a good number to work with. I picked 2 hours of audiobook listening a day because my commute to work is about 2 hours round-trip so that’s what I listen to in a day. The numbers don’t line up because audiobooks are read at a slower pace generally.

So at those paces, here is how long it would take to finish the entire Horus Heresy and SIege of Terra books:

Reading
Horus Heresy: ~22,500 pages, 224 days or 7 months and 11 days
Siege of Terra: ~4,200 pages,  42 days or 1 month and 12 days
Both: ~26,700 pages, 266 days or 8 months and 23 days

Listening
Horus Heresy: 684 hours, 342 days or 11 months and 8 days
Siege of Terra: 153 hours, 77 days or 2 months and 17 days
Both:  837 hours, 418 days or 1 year 1 month and 23 days

Reading and Listening at same time (100 pages read and 2 hours listening)
Horus Heresy: 128 days or 4 months and 8 days
Siege of Terra: 24 days
Both: 152 days or 5 months and 2 days

So it’s really not that bad! At that pace, you could start reading the books today and finish the end of March next year, or finish listening to audiobooks by the end of August 2027. Looking at it that way, 64 titles doesn’t seem as daunting.

But I’m not done, there are hundreds more books out there, and more every month…

This is the part where I start to become undone and I begin questioning my sanity. There are many ways to count every Sci-Fi book released by Black Library. Novels, novellas, anthologies, omnibuses, short stories, graphic novels, etc. And then there are genres that aren’t usually counted, like the horror and crime books. Making it even harder to count is all the collections, and some of those have books in them that aren’t released elsewhere. So you can’t just not count every omnibus and anthology, you have to go through each one and count the stories as separate books, making sure not to count those later as standalone books. I would’ve just counted every Audible audiobook, but there is a similar problem. Collections of short stories that weren’t printed physically, repeat releases, and you can’t just search for “Warhammer 40,000” because Amazon doesn’t include every title in that “series.” All the smaller series are broken up into their own separate series and oh my Emperor who the HECK designed this cataloging system?!?! But it did help me narrow down some. In the end, I came up with 440 titles! I even emailed Games Workshop and asked them for an official count and got no response. Oh well, wasn’t expecting them to reply, whoever read my email is probably just concerned. Hooray, time for math! Here’s the criteria I used:

• Had to have a physical *and* audiobook release. This way the numbers line up in a similar way to the HH & SoT numbers.
• Best I could, no titles were counted twice. So if it was in an omnibus, it’s not counted on its own.
• I didn’t include short stories that were in omnibuses (omnibusi? omnibus’?) and other collections because that would’ve messed with the average book length number.
• I counted all the genres. Classic sci-fi, horror, crime, all of it.

I probably missed stuff. Based on some of the book counts that came up in my searches, I definitely did. Unless all those were wrong and were double counting books, which I doubt. Older stuff just isn’t catalogued online properly. I’m sure there are some titles and entire series that are basically lost to time. But I can confidently say this covers the vast majority and has all the “major” titles included. And for simplicity of math, I used an average of 415 pages per book and an average listening time of 11 hours. So time for numbers!

If we woke up tomorrow morning and GW announced on WarComm that Black Library would be shutting down and no more books would be released, here’s what we have if we read/listened at the same pace as the HH/SoT books:

Reading- 182,600 pages, 1826 days or 5 years exactly. Don’t forget about leap years!
Listening- 4,840 hours, 2,420 days or 6 years 7 months and 16 days.

Whew, that’s a lot! However, the odds of the Black Library shutting down is small. So how long will it take to read and listen to everything while also catching up on every new release? It’s gonna take a bit longer. Since there could be anywhere from 50 to 75 or more books released in a year, I settled with an increase of 20 a year. Why? Best I could figure, the 50+ number included AoS, limited editions, collections, and reprints. So 20 felt safe. Here’s the numbers, without page count because my scribbles were incoherent and I don’t want to repeat the math:

Reading- 6 years 5 months and 20 days
Listening- 9 years 5 months and 23 days

Of course that’s nowhere close to a guarantee. That’s assuming the pace of 20 a year, the similar length, no repeat releases, and similar size/length.

But what if you don’t want to read all that, and just want to finish some other major collections after finishing HH/SoT? Don’t worry, my meltdown work continues! At the same pace as before, and assuming I didn’t miss any titles, here is how long it would take to read some other series:

Gaunt’s Ghosts- 8,500 pages, 234 hours, 85 days to read and 117 days to listen
Eisenhorn/Ravenor/Bequin- 6,000 pages, 165 hours, 60 days to read and 83 days to listen
Ciaphas Cain- 7,500 pages, 206 hours, 75 days to read, 103 days to listen
Blood Angels- 5,000 pages, 138 hours, 50 days to read, 69 (nice!) days to listen
Night Lords- 1,400 pages, 36 hours, 14 days to read, 20 days to listen

That’s just a few examples. To close this whole thing out, I wanted to see how long it would take to tackle some completely different series’. My thought is it would be interesting to see how long it would take to finish other major book series, and just for fun I included shows/movies. Here are the numbers there:

Lord of the Rings + The Hobbit + The Silmarillion- 1,800 pages, 18 days
I know there are countless reprints and versions, so I found a box set that had all these books printed together and used those numbers. I didn’t include all the other side books because I know J.R.R. Tolkien didn’t completely write them all and I couldn’t be bothered to figure it out.
Wheel of Time-  12,000 pages, 120 days or 4 months
That’s just half of the Heresy! I included the books finished by Sanderson because why not, I’m making the rules here

Instead of audiobooks, I decided to include two franchises that are movies and shows. So it’s like audiobooks but you’re using your eyes as well. I guess you could just listen to them if you really wanted to!

Marvel Cinematic Universe- 210 hours, 105 days or 3.5 months
For this, I included every movie and every series Disney+ series. I didn’t include the Netflix shows or Agents of Shield. AoS (Agents of Shield, not Age of Sigmar) is fantastic and so is the original Daredevil, but I wasn’t sure if they were canon or not and watching these would also include the first season of Iron Fist and I didn’t want to do that to anyone.

Doctor Who- 850 hours, 425 days, or 1 year, 2 months, and 14 days
I knew this would be a lot but dang I didn’t realize it would take well over a year! I included all show episodes from the original and “new” run, as well as all the movies I could find. I suppose the numbers could be slightly off because it wouldn’t surprise me if there was some lost media in here.

So that’s it. If you made it to the end here, congrats! The prize is knowledge, and that’s power. Or so I hear. I hope this breakdown helps people out and encourages newer readers to not be intimidated by the size of the Black Library catalogue. Read what you want, don't feel pressured to read everything. Realistically, that won't happen. Find what brings you joy and read more of it! And to reiterate, this was for fun so don’t roast me if I got something wrong. I made some assumptions and best guesses, and also might’ve messed up some math. So just enjoy it for what it is 🙂 
Thanks for reading, now get back to those books!

Edit for clarity: I may have phrased it weird when I was referring to reading and listening at the same time. I didn’t mean literally reading at listening at the same time, I meant if you were to read 2 hours a day and also listen 2 hours a day. My bad if there was a misunderstanding!

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