This is the kind of question only a slow reader (like me) asks. What we’re doing - us ’slowies’ with our ‘One book a month perhaps if we really knuckle down on a Sunday rather than get stuck watching X-Factor again, however ‘ironically’ we’re allegedly ‘enjoying’ it’ - is trying to find the secret to others’ reading speed.

‘Really, a book every three days you say? And how many hours would you say that was? Do you scan read? Do you remember any of the plot afterward? Do you get mixed up? Has Emma Woodhouse ended up sharing a lifeboat with a Bengali tiger? Have the clocks struck thirteen in Discworld?’

It’s all envy. I know full well that I’ll never read every book I want to in my lifetime (how awful would that be anyway?) but it’s depressing to think that so many others are way ahead of me in the reading stakes. I have terrible gaps in my reading too: the pile of books I should read or authors I should know about gets larger and more intimidating by the hour.

But perhaps I’m going about this the wrong way. Yes, I am a slow reader, and actually slow down even more when I’m really enjoying a book, but only so that I don’t have to stop reading whatever it is. We all must have those books you wish you could read for the first time again, that book that goes off in your head like a clap of thunder, that changes - perhaps forever - the way you see the world or yourself.

What I really want then is to have that one book again and again, forgetting it completely in time for me to start it over and be amazed once more. But in the absence of time machines or memory wiping gadgets, I read on, hoping the next book will replicate that feeling.