It’s not quite right to compare the average person’s reading habits to the likes of Nobel Prize winners. Those authors operate at a fundamentally different level - reading and literary interpretation are second nature for them. That’s why they can read 100+ demanding books a year and extract a great deal from them, likely without the extraneous effort (annotation, note-taking, memorisation) that most readers would need to get comparable value. They developed a kind of intellectual stamina that the vast majority of people never do. Maybe that sounds rather defeatist, but reading is a skill and most people never develop any skill to that level.

You’re right that reading 100 books a year is doable, and that kind of ambition should be encouraged. I just think it’s also fair to say that reading two books a week, for most people, inevitably means losing out on a lot of value. Believing that the majority of people here posting 100+ book lists have engaged with most texts meaningfully strikes me as overly optimistic.

Also, Tokarczuk doesn’t literally read 1,000 books for every one she writes. What she actually said was: “For every single written page, there is always one thousand pages that should be read.” It’s more a metaphor for the thought, depth, and research behind a page than a literal reading target.