If you listen her speak off the cuff about material she has read and respond in real time to random questions you would likely soon come to believe her to have significant powers of recall and comprehension .. in a few languages.

Might explain how she landed a role as Professor of classics at Cambridge, a fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge, and Royal Academy of Arts Professor of Ancient Literature.

She's 71, so I assume she's pretty much retired, and can dedicate a lot of time to this (you'd really have to be willing and able to do so to sign up for this). That's about one a day. It seems... doable, though it's obviously a lot.

27 a month?

So, a little less than one a day? That seems eminently doable -- I read more than that in my teens, considerably more sometimes, for years at a time. (Of course I had no internet to distract me: my teens were from about 1977 to 1986.)

I have read the Lord of the Rings trilogy 5 times, Kim Stnaley Robinson's Mars trilogy 6 times, and the entire Frank Herbert _Dune_ series twice. In my early teens, if under time pressure, several times I read about half a dozen novels in an afternoon.

For a retired professional? Sure. I'd be surprised if she couldn't.

Around 1997-1998, I was freelance, not working a lot, and lived with a judge of the Arthur C Clarke award. I read pretty much all the new SF published in the UK both years. A couple of hundred books a year, while working.

Let’s take your six novels in an afternoon. Il be generous and give you the entire six hours for six novels. Even at a relatively low page count of 250 pages each novel it would mean you read more than 4 pages a minute, for six hours straight. And if any of those six novels had more pages (very likely given the books you name drop) you could easily need to double the number of pages read per minute.

So at best you skimmed six books in an afternoon, which IS a time-honoured tradition by school kids who have reports due.

I think you seriously underestimate just how fast a properly fast reader can go. On an unrelated note, I remember a line (from Jo Walton I think) on seeing one of those tedious ads—most CEOs read six book a week. To which, “not surprising, they’ve terribly responsible jobs and not much time”

> Il be generous and give you the entire six hours for six novels.

If you think that is "generous" then you underestimate the levels of focus a teenager (with a young, elastic bladder) can have. Do you know any teenagers?

:-D

> Even at a relatively low page count of 250 pages each novel

I just turned 59 this weekend. When I was a kit, books were shorter. Often much shorter. A typical paperback SF novel in the 1970s was under 200pp and typically somewhere around 150-175.

There was a reason for those binge sessions: my family was preparing to leave Nigeria forever, and it took nearly 2 months to do all the paperwork. We lived in the Mainland Hotel in Lagos (it's still there) and my dad had a friend who was a member of the Lagos Yacht Club. Its private library had a very good SF section, but only members could borrow books... So I had to read as much as I could while we were there as guests on Sunday afternoons.

Cue manic hyper-fixated focus.

One of the ones I read in those visits was Mission of Gravity by Hal Clement. Still a favourite, nearly half a century later.

> it would mean you read more than 4 pages a minute, for six hours straight.

No problem.

I tore through them as fast as possible, then went back through them in my memory over the following week. Favourites, ones I really enjoyed, like the Clement, some Jack Vance books, some Silverberg, some Sturgeon, I went back and reread.

My greatest "feat" was probably totally forgetting my summer holiday reading a few years later, at school in the Isle of Man. We were reminded on the first day of term. I read all of Joseph Conrad's Victory that night, starting as soon as I got home from school at about 6PM, finishing about 9:30PM, writing a report in the next hour, and then sleeping.

I got a B+.

No, not skimming.